ANECDOTES

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Clint Eastwood was a contract player at Universal International. He and actor Burt Reynolds were released from their contracts and left the studio on the same day. They were both fired by the same director.

Eastwood was fired when the director didn’t want to use him in a movie because “his Adam’s Apple was too big.”

Reynolds, who was serving as a stunt man, was fired after he shoved the director into a water tank during an argument over how to do a stunt fall.

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Given his penchant towards directing or starring in westerns, it is appropriate that his name, Clint Eastwood, is an anagram for ‘old west action.’

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John Erskine was once asked if he found it disconcerting to see members of the audience looking at their watches during a long lecture.

“No,” replied Erskine, “not until they start shaking them.”

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Phil Esposito was one of the North American ice-hockey players who went to Moscow to play the Soviet team in the early 1970s. Assigned to a hotel room, they suspected that it might be bugged.

Esposito recalls, “We searched the room for microphones. In the centre of the room, we found a funny-looking, round piece of metal imbedded in the floor, under the rug. We figured we had found the bug. We dug it out of the floor. And we heard a crash beneath us. We had released the anchor to the chandelier in the ceiling below.”

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A young lady was taken to dinner one evening by Willim Gladstone and the following evening by Benjamin Disraeli, both of whom were UK Prime Ministers in their time.

Asked what impressions these two celebrated men had made upon her, she replied,

“When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.”

Gladstone and Disraeli

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Edgworth David

During the South Polar expedition, Sir Edgeworth David’s assistant, Douglas Mawson, was working in his tent one day when he heard a muffled cry from outside. “Are you very busy?” called the voice, which Mawson recognised as that of Sir Edgeworth.

“Yes I am,” he replied. “What’s the matter?”

“Are you really very busy?”

“Yes,” snapped Mawson, losing his patience. “What is it you want?”

After a moment’s silence, David replied apologetically, “Well, I’m down a crevasse, and I don’t think I can hang on much longer.”

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Salvador Dali once took his pet ocelot with him to a New York restaurant and tethered it to a leg of the table while he ordered coffee. A middle-aged lady walked past and looked at the animal in horror. “What’s that?” she cried. “It’s only a cat,” said Dali scathingly. “I’ve painted it over with an op-art design.” The woman, embarrassed by her initial reaction, took a closer look and sighed with relief. “I can see now that’s what it is,” she said. “At first I thought it was a real ocelot.”

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Reporters would on occasion tease the energetic and hard-working Clarence Darrow about his disheveled appearance.

Darrow retorted, “I go to a better tailor than any of you and pay more for my clothes. The only difference is that you probably don’t sleep in yours.”

Darrow during the Scopes Monkey Trial

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Christos Papadimitriou is a professor in EECS at University of California, Berkeley.

He co-authored a paper, “Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal,” with Bill Gates, while Gates was studying at Harvard. This is what he thought of him:

When I was an assistant professor at Harvard, Bill was a junior. My girlfriend back then said that I had told her: “There’s this undergrad at school who is the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

Two years later, I called to tell him our paper had been accepted to a fine math journal. He sounded eminently disinterested. He had moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to run a small company writing code for microprocessors, of all things. I remember thinking: “Such a brilliant kid. What a waste.”

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Jean Cocteau was once asked if he believed in luck.

“Of course,” he replied. “How else do you explain the success of those you don’t like?”

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Agatha Christie’s second husband, Max Mallowan, was a distinguished archaeologist who made his name excavating in Mesopotamia. On her return with her husband from the Middle East, Miss Christie was asked how she felt about being married to a man whose interest lay in antiquities. “An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have,” she said. “The older she gets, the more interested he is in her.”

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