News-Press from Fort Myers, Florida • Page 39

News-Press Southwest Florida Lifestyles, Culture And Entertainment People SECTION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1980 V- i 7, $sf I (V "A A A I I A vw fa X. I i Keke Anderson Nancy Reagan Rosalynn Carfer WiiDD fhe cecal first lady please stand? have dinner but, never having seen me, protected himself by saying he had an early cail the next day. I said I had an early call, too," she says. "During dinner, he said, 'Why don't we see the first show at It was Sophie Tucker. During the first show he said, 'Why don't we stay and see the second We got home about 2 a.m." She says she quickly, easily bid adieu to her film career when Reagan proposed, explaining: "My life began with Ronnie." Rosalynn Smith was taking a walk with her friend Ruth Carter in Plains, one afternoon when Jimmy and a friend rolled by in a rumble-seater Ford.

The boys took the girls to the movies. Later that night, Jimmy's mother asked her son, an Annapolis senior, what he thought of the young Smith girl. Said Jimmy: "She's the girl I want to marry." Another thing each of these women has in common is the memory of growing up poor. Rosalynn was 13 when her father, a mechanic and school bus driver, died of leukemia. Her mother took in sewing Turn to WIVES, Page 3D whose sister Ruth was her best friend.

Psycho-historians will have to figure out if it was only coincidence that the three leading contenders for the presidency in 1980 were married to such strong women. Not all presidents' wives are like that. Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower and Betty Ford went along with great reluctance when their husbands ran for president. Many who know Rosalynn Carter, Mrs. Reagan and Keke Anderson say that they want the White House at least as much as their husbands do.

These women are markedly different in many ways, of course, and some of their characteristics are common to most political wives. But still: Keke Anderson worked as a photographer at the State Department when John, a young diplomat about to be sent to Berlin, came in to be photographed. They corresponded after he was posted overseas, but she wanted to land him. As a ploy, she wrote him that someone else had proposed. "Come to me," he cabled her.

She wired back: "Am considering telegram a proposal. Send money." And Nancy Reagan can still recall that first date with Ronnie. "Ronnie called and asked me to to American society." 3. Washington Post reporter Sally Quinn describes our next woman listening to a speech by her husband: "She can sit perfectly still, her ankles neatly crossed, her hands resting calmly in her lap, her chin uplifted, her eyes glistening, her lips smiling for what seems like hours and hang raptly on his every word no matter what he is saying, no matter how many times she has heard it before in their 28-year marriage. She never seems to get an itch, her lips never stick to her teeth, she hardly blinks.

Don't her legs ever -go to sleep? Haven't they ever had a terrible fight just before the speech? Isn't she ever bored hearing the whole thing over and over again?" The answers: 1. Rosalynn Carter, 2. Keke Anderson and 3. Nancy Reagan. But change a few details and any of the anecdotes could apply to any of the three.

For example, if Keke loves to tell about her whirlwind romance with John Anderson, Nancy Reagan loves to tell of her first dale with Ronald Reagan, when both were in the movies, and Rosalynn Carter has told a thousand times about her crush with the handsome Naval Academy cadet By MIKE FEINSILBER Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON Here is a quiz about three women, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan and Keke Anderson. One of them will be the next first lady. Your job is to match the women with the anecdotes about them. Answers below. 1.

As a college girl, she had a number of admirers, but she developed a crush on the older brother of her best friend. He was from one of the wealthiest families in town and was regarded as a highly eligible bachelor. But she came from a poor background. Her mother was a seamstress and she worked in a beauty parlor. While he was off in college, they exchanged letters and dated at Christmas.

After the first date, he told his mother he was going to marry her. He did, the following July. 2. She says that when her husband is elected president it is always "when," never "if" she will not be called first lady. No, she says, "I'll be the president's lady.

It's more romantic. Then, every year my husband is in office I'll give the title of first lady to a woman who has made a contribution 'Landslide Lyndon1 did he steal the election? Lyndon Part 2 when he was a freshman congressman when anything seemed possible and often was, or those later years when he was the most powerful man in town. Both were intoxicating. Sen. Morris Sheppard of Texas died on April 4, 1941; he was 65 years old.

On April 19, Gov. Wilbert L. (Pappy) O'Daniel announced that a special election would be held on June 28 to choose a successor. Pappy assured Lyndon that he was not even considering running for the seat; Lyndon believed him. Lyndon went to the White House and showed President Roosevelt the draft of a statement he had written announcing his own candidacy for the Seriate.

The president suggested that Lyndon read it on the White House steps, and a few minutes later, he did. Eventually 29 candidates entered the race, including Pappy O'Daniel who won. It was the first and only election Lyndon B. Johnson ever lost. Johnson stayed in the House of Representatives, but by 1947 he was ready to try for the Senate again.

Lyndon announced his candidacy on May 12 in the penthouse of the Driskill Hotel in Austin. He made his first speech 10 days later before a small crowd that Turn to LBJ, Page 3D dle with him and said, 'You must run for this The 28-year-old Johnson quit his job as state director of the National Youth Administration and entered active, competitive politics. His election victory made the front page of the New York Times, which noted that he had "shouted his advocacy of President Roosevelt's (Supreme) Court reorganization all over the Tenth Texas District." By happy coincidence, Roosevelt was about to begin a fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico. Johnson was invited to meet him in Galveston, where the president expressed his gratitude and gave his blessing to the young Lochinvar. He also gave him the phone number of Thomas G.

(Tommy the Cork) Corcoran, his friend and adviser and one of the most powerful men in Washington, telling Lyndon that Tommy would take care of him once he got to Washington. Corcoran: "When Roosevelt got back from that trip to Texas, he told me to take care of this boy and put him on the Naval Affairs Committee. There were others who'd been around for awhile and were in line, but naturally Lyndon got the appointment." Late in life Lyndon used to say that he couldn't decide whether he preferred Washington in the days This is the second of a series of excerpts from Merle Miller's recently published book "Lyndon: An Oral Biography." By MERLE MILLER Of all the controversies that swirled around Lyndon Baines Johnson during his long public life, none was as fogged in confusion and suspicion as his successful race for the U.S. Senate in 1948. It left him a nickname, "Landslide Lyndon," that he never lived down.

The tangled roots of the "landslide" go back to 1947, when Rep. Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Tex.) began showing signs that he was ready and eager to move on to higher things. That readiness was nothing new. He always had seemed to move faster, more visibly, more vocally, since his youngest days at the farmhouse by the Peder-nales in the Texas hill country where he was born, as his mother Rebekah recorded later, at the auspicious hour of daybreak on Aug.

27, 1908. There is no doubt that the pivot of Rebekah's life was her eldest child. Rebekah (much later, on hearing rumors that her son might become president): "I'm not surprised. 'Course it's a mother talking, but from the first time I looked into his eyes, none of his accomplishments surprised me." Lyndon's first run for public office came in 1937 after Rep. James Buchanar age 70, died of a heart attack in Washington.

Mary Rather, a longtime friend: "The very moment that Congressman Buchanan died, Senator Al-vin Wirtz (an early Johnson mentor) was saying, 'Get Lyndon for And he immediately went into a hud You would have to be crazy to want to see 'Schizoid' Movie Review his own little son hiding among the hedges at night in a snow storm; it is the ultimate hide-and-go-seek. There is also a theory that thrillerchiller movies are especially popular during periods of social uncertainty. Wherever they got the message, moviemakers are betting big at the box office on horror this fall, with the release of at least a dozen new shockers scheduled before Christmas. The talent attached to some of these new films makes them promising. Unfortunately, there will also be some from people whose principal talent is grabbing a quick, cheap ride on a trend.

"Schizoid," which arrived in our area Friday, is a movie whose only hope is to attract more than a handful of ticket buyers wherever it plays before word gets around. The word, on "Schizoid," is "rotten." It is difficult to see how a picture this bad could be made even by accident. There is a lot of peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek in "Schizoid," but it is so ploddingly done that there is none of the excitement and even exhilaration that you can remember from childhood games. Everything about "Schizoid" feels wrong. The location, which is supposed to be Los Angeles, doesn't look, feel or sound like Los Angeles, or anyplace else.

The casting throws together a bunch of people with no identities of their own, and the directing keeps them out of touch with each other throughout the movie. These characters all behave in ways that reveal no purpose and make no sense. Sex is sleazy and degrading. Suspense is almost non-existent, even though there is a tiresome lot of tricks intended to mislead. When "Schizoid" is almost over, and you see who the murderer is supposed to be, you don't care enough one way or the other to look back over the action to see if any of the "mystery" makes sense.

The script probably called for one of those final scenes in which somebody, usually a psychiatrist, ex-, plains to a bunch of police officers and reporters what the killer did and why he did it. That worked in "Psycho" and "Dressed to Kill." It is obvious why this was finally left out of "Schizoid," though: they couldn't find anyone, including the scriptwriters, who COULD explain. "Schizoid" does have Klaus Kinski, a Polish actor of unusual and unsettling appearance, in a major role. Kinski is getting a lot of work and a lot of critical attention right now, and is an interesting actor to watch. Kinski feels just as wrong as everything else, in "Schizoid," however.

4 "Schizoid," now playing at Cinema Fort Myers. Rated R. By GEORGE BOUWMAN News-Press Movie Critic Why do people pay to get into a movie theater just to be scared out of their wits? A lot of us are doing that these days. One theory is that we are relieved by seeing our deepest fears played out, just as children make up games around things that frighten them. Even the oldest and earliest games, such as peek-a-boo, blind man's bluff, and hide-and-go-seek are based on experience which is essentially frightening.

Someone pops out at you unexpectedly, like a living jack-in-the-box, and then is gone again. If you are "it" in blind man's bluff, people you can't see poke at you; if you are not "it" there is still something scary in having the "blind man" grab at you. Hide-and-go-seek has all the elements of a good suspense movie. There is a cast of motivated characters each playing a prescribed role. There are confined spaces and low camera angles; montage editing of feet, ears, mouths, eyes; there are stealthy sound effects, and much, much camera movement.

There is 1 i shrinking into dark corners while the hunter comes closer and closer, then a critical moment of exposure and a frenzied break for "home" and safety. These are the games the best of the horror films play very well indeed. Anthony Perkins in "Psycho" pops out of hiding dressed as his long dead mother and wielding a long, long kitchen knife. The monstrous eye of the ape in "King Kong" is seen peek-a-boo fashion through the windows of the offices of the Empire State Building. In Brian dePalma's "Dressed to Kill" all the victims are "bluffed," blind to the identity of the disguised killer.

In Stanely Kubrick's "The Shining," the possessed Jack Nicholson searches murderously for.