Quotes from Bob Spitz

Julia dealt with rules the way she later dealt with vegetarians; she pretended they didn't exist.

On the endive show, she offered a Yogi Berra-style malaprop: "Now don't wash endive-that is, unless it's dirty." And during an episode of forgetfulness: "I did not have my glasses on when I was thinking." Once, she sorted through a jungle of seaweed in search of a twenty-pound lobster lurking in its folds; another time, she lifted the veil over a platter hunting for the "big, bad artichoke" lying furtively underneath.

It existed almost by oversight, "far removed from reality," as one of the "Kandy Kids" wrote, "where everyone had an academic interest in the war but found life far too pleasant to do anything too drastic about it.

And yet at the center of this vortex was the desire to do something more with it. What or with whom, he wasn't sure. But he sensed it was only a matter of time until it all came together and he put his own stamp on it. Eight months later, he met John Lennon.

where he was on a first-name basis with the pretty, long-legged usherettes who paraded along the aisles.

Even on TV, she was larger than life. At fifty, she was a vibrant, vivacious woman, not obviously pretty or delicate, but handsome, and never more so than when she encountered food and her eyes sparkled. Julia looked at food the way some people looked at their children, and when she cast her adoring gaze at three pounds of raw beef chuck, the folks at home knew something was up.

for that pent?up ambition.

He based these anecdotes largely on stories he'd read in unverified accounts in small-town newspapers and crackpot magazines. It didn't matter that most of the facts and figures didn't check out. They stuck where it mattered: in the craw of hardworking taxpayers who felt cheated by so-called government entitlements. John Sears grew concerned that these yarns of Reagan's might come back to haunt him.

The whole process at the "Inny," as it was known, imitated a grand and long-standing intellectual tradition, and nothing defined it better than the august school motto: No nobis solum set toti mundo nati—You're born not for yourself but for the whole world.

The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn't represent the people. It controls them." Uh-oh, the reporter thought. Topics like these, he knew, were strictly off-limits. But John persisted. "All they seem to want to do

There would be babies born to Beatles, to Beatles fans, millions of people who lived their lives to a soundtrack crafted by four Scouse boys who had either grown up or passed along.

they were now calling themselves the Beatles.

By mid-1966, an astounding eighty-eight Lennon-McCartney songs had been recorded in over 2,900 versions. Gershwin finally had competition.

The new repertoire, almost to a song, had lost its collaborative aspect. They were individual efforts—