That pensive lady clutching the eerie-looking doll is Susan Blakely in Secrets, ABC's chilling movie scheduled to air Feb. 20. Model-turned-Actress Blakely, 27, plays Andrea, a psychologically disturbed young wife who turns into a nymphomaniac. She is also possessed by the notion that her dead mother is a wicked puppet queen. Her mother's crime? Teaching Andrea that everything she does must be aimed at attracting men. "What the mother teaches the child is almost like the normal belief system many women are taught," observes Blakely. "The plot is something women will connect to."
"I go for two kinds of men," coos Mae West. "The kind with muscles and the kind without." Now 83, she is playing her first starring film role in 33 years: a movie star just wed to her sixth spouse. George Hamilton and Ringo Starr play two of her exes, and Dom DeLuise is her hyperactive manager. Titled Sextette, the movie is based on a play written by West, whose own love life is legend. Being a star again seems to have rejuvenated her. "I feel like I'm 20," says Mae. "No, make that more like 26."
"I suppose there is an uncanny resemblance," says Actor Peter Boyle about his lookalike, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy. Boyle, 40, stars as the Red-baiting chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in NBC's Feb. 6 movie, Tail Gunner Joe. The film, which also features Burgess Meredith as Lawyer Joseph Welch, Patricia Neal as Senator Margaret Chase Smith and George Wyner as Roy Cohn, spans McCarthy's life from his teen-age years to his death in 1957. The title comes from a bizarre publicity stunt staged during his World War II Marine days. To look like a hero back home, McCarthy engineered news photographs of himself pretending to be a tail gunner. After the war, his campaign brochures announced that he was "known in the Pacific as Tail Gunner Joe.' "
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is "sheer nonsense," opined Author Rebecca West. For one thing, young girls in love do not go to their first balls in a "state of lust" like hussars, she argued. The occasion: a 75th anniversary poll by London's Times Literary Supplement of 43 writers, artists and scholars who were asked to name the 20th century authors or books they consider the most overrated—or underrated. Arnold Toynbee and E.M. Forster, it seems, have the most inflated reputations. In addition to Forster, Anthony Burgess cited Andre Gide and Hermann Hesse. J.K. Galbraith called Ring Lardner underrated, while Vladimir Nabokov found H.G. Wells' The Passionate Friends the century's most "unjustly ignored masterpiece," though he had not read it for 60 years. Bob Dylan named only one book, which was, he said, both underrated and overrated. His selection: the Bible.