"Life Stories: profiles from the New Yorker"

[fiefoe]

Wunderkind (Floyd Patterson) / A. J. Liebling (1954)

• The development of an interesting performer is always an attraction.
• Live conspicuously and let live inconspicuously is Patterson's motto. He accepts the fact that others raise their hands against him, but when a fellow like Gannon raises his right hand, a fellow like Patterson feels himself belittled.
  
• Now he was in that distressful state when every evasive move brings new disaster, until it seems to the boxer and his public that he is ducking into fists, circling into fists, slipping into fists. His nose was a red circle on his face. 
  

Jimmy Soo, a rising Chinese-Irish boxer at that time. 
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Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale (Johnny Carson) / Kenneth Tynan (1978)

    There is a general sense of unease in this article. The writer allowed that 'there is such a thing as the pleasure of the expected', but he clearly had reservations about TV as mass medium ('obstinately provincial, addressing itself to a village no bigger than a nation'), and its evergreen star ('his eyes twinkling like icicles', 'Long - or, at least, as long as the air at the summit continues to nourish and elate him - may he stay there.')

• 'What made you a star?' Carson: 'I started out in a gaseous state, and then I cooled.'
• Carson's stock answers: 3. Only twice in my life, both times on Saturday. 5. No. Kumquats.
• Gore Vidal: 'Always a godfather, never a god.'
• 'Where do you get ideas for your work?' Buck Henry: 'Oh, everyday places. Looking through keyholes.'
• Carson wanted for his epitaph - 'I'll be right back.'
• Like many places where West Coast nabobs dwell, it is about as grand as a house can be that has no staircase.
• Professor Finley, master of Eliot House, on giving Carson a tour: 'At first, I thought it was an asinine idea. ... But, after all, how important is one's time, anyway?'

Allusions abound: Harold Pinter (my word!), Robert Ardrey, Paul Ehrlich, Louis XV's 'Après Moi, Le Deluge', mutatis mutandis (with the necessary changes), vide supra, passim (see above, thus in various places).