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No Help for Daddy. It is also the sort of Americanism that aging (68) Harold Gray admires. In search of it, he travels 40,000 miles a year, listens to gas-station operators, bellhops and cab drivers ("You loosen one of those guys up and you can learn more in five minutes than you can learn from a politician in five weeks'"). Annie, whom Gray considers "an ordinary, middle-of-the-road American" enlisted in the cause of "motherhood, honesty and decency," serves as mouthpiece for the people Gray has quizzed. So does Daddy Warbucks, "who believes in doing his job and not asking for help from anyone." (Although he sometimes gets it without asking. Last week, a disloyal Warbucks lieutenant, who was slipping Daddy's billion-dollar business secrets to a competitor, was blown up by a grenade. The grenade lobber: a chimpanzee named Elwood.)
Gray agrees that Annie dabbles in dialectics, and he has no intention, of stopping her. To Artist Gray, Daddy and Annie are salesmen of the American dream, the "pioneer spirit" that without assistance, even from the State Department, can cope with Castro, neutralize the H-bomb, and eliminate the income tax.
*"If you try to draw nice eyes," says Artist Gray, explaining Annie's vacuous stare, "they look like burned holes. I found out those round eyes don't fog up in bad printing."