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When his marriage soured, Brinkley for a time could be found in quiet restaurant corners with Washington's most eligible women, like Barbara Howar or the 1951 Miss America, Yolande Betbeze Fox. Gossip columns lately have linked him with Actress Lauren Bacall. At the very mention, his lips curl dourly: "I hardly even know the woman." He calls such chitchat "degrading" and again blames it on the star system resulting from "one man or two men appearing every day in the role of all-wise, all-knowing journalistic supermen. It is absurd." So absurd, he said in a Columbia University lecture honoring Elmer Davis, "that it may be that Huntley and Cronkite and I and a few others are the last of a type." That was in 1966. With the Huntley-Brinkley Report as profitable as it is, he now fears that TV anchormen are as indestructible as federal bureaucrats.