The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 32

Cos Anodes State Clothing Ideas Fashioned by the Climate IEW ORANGE COUNTY PART IV FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1977 r-y- 4 btJwi ill''-. ItSiiilM --js- BY MARYLOU LUTHER Tlmti Fashion Editor When she won her second of three Coty awards in 1968, Bonnie Cashin was described as "an all -American original anticostume, antigimmick and invariably 15 steps ahead of the crowd." When she won her Hall of Fame award in 1972, they said, "She is closer kin to the first desert wanderer who put on a djellaba, or the first Indian who cut hide into clothing, than she is to what's generally called a fashion designer. The nomad and the Indian were thinking first about climate, comfort and practicality. So, always, is she." And right now, Bonnie Cashin is thinking about the weather. Not the climate of fashion in terms of full skirts versus narrow pants or gypsies versus milkmaids, but the weather.

The new weather with temperatures so mercurial some say our climate has caught the flu. The new weather with its attendant fuel shortages, The drought. The intrastate battle over who gets to seed which clouds when. The im- CRITIC AT LARGE A Shamus in Shambles i SKIPPERS' SKIPPER Bill Ficker of Newport Beach is shown at helm of the Intrepid, which he skippered in 1973 America's Cup race. He's one of top skippers in big-boat ocean racing.

GAME FOR THE RICH Yacht Racing Tempts the Big Spenders BY CHARLES CHAMPLIN Tlmil Aril Editor Apple pip. of course, derives from strudcl, an import, so if you're looking for a more accurate measure, what could be more American than the western or the private eye film? Both kinds of films were born directly out of the American experience and both occupy those places in the national affection always reserved for folk tales and heroic myths, They are versatile and inexhaustibly entertaining. When they are awful they are still not too bad, and when they are almost perfect, like Robert Benton's "The Late Show," they are snugly satisfying. "The Late Show," which Benton wrote and directed and Robert Altman produced, is an appreciation, a kind of rolling into one of the principle ingredients of all the private eye flicks that ever played The Late Show (and the Morning, Noon, Matinee and Early Shows as well). The Diamonds, Spades, whatever suits; Shaynes and Marlowes and Continental Ops as anonymous as raincoats.

An appreciation. Not a gaggy parody like (memory winces) "The Maltese Bippy" and not a cynical reshaping and updating like Altman's own "The Long Goodby," but an artful and affectionate original, lively and enjoyable on its own self-sufficient terms, which catches the spirit and reflects the structure of the previous private eye pleasures. BY ANNE LaKIVIERE Times Staff Writer So far it isn't a popular sport for women. Nor is it a poor man's sport or even a sport for a person of moderate wealth. It's a game for the rich where dollars are spent by the hundreds of thousands to secure a winner that may be only one second ahead of the loser.

It's big boat racing on the high seas. These are the yachts 1 jA that arc read about surging past a point in the Bahamas at midnight in a mad dash for the finish line at Nassau. Or they take off en masse in a race for Honolulu with multicolored spinnakers popping up like balloons released at an afternoon football game. The owner-skipper of such a vessel could spend up to a million dollars for a 73-foot boat. Add the cost of getting the boat across the United States or even to another country for racing, add the expense of a crew and the cash to repair damages incurred in the race and the ranks of those who can afford this sport quickly close.

California Contributes Players California contributes more than its fair share of players in this game. Because of the temperate climate, they stay in practice year 'round. They tunc up their boats, try out new sails and X-ray (that's right X-ray) fittings from the mast so parts can be replaced before they break. In the business world these men are on top. issuing orders and making decisions.

They anticipate circumstances and move in directions to take advantage of them or to avoid them. They maneuver their careers so the businesses they command make more profits or outdo the competition or succeed like never before. Then they turn their backs to this kind of tempest and operate the same way in their leisure time. They command some of the most prestigious boats on the sea in the big-sailboat world, and when their boats become the least bit antiquated they call the builder to order a fresh one. Why not golf? Or handball? These men could buy whole racquet clubs if they were as avidly committed to tennis.

Mutual Mania for Winning Camaraderie the friendship among men with a mutual mania for winning and winning big. One of the most important things these big-boat games-men do is pick the crew that can surround them with that sweet championship feeling. They spend months interviewing prospective navigators, or someone to work on the forcdeck or someone to do the cooking. They shop for crews like they might shop for prospective sons-in-law (if they could) and they put together a group that rivals efficiency of their business organization. With the right crew, the sport affords all the attributes of Please Turn to Page 1 5, Col.

1 i mmm mmm mm, iiiwiimiiroiiiiiiioiitm.tiKiwiiwiM ilk, rn From the establishing very slow pan shot around a seedy and cluttered bachelor room during the titles, "The Late Show" in effect says welcome home. This time Art Carney is a gimpy private eye, pushed into early retirement by lack of trade and trying his hand at a memoir, so far only one paragraph deep. Howard Duff who, far from coincidentally, was radio's first Sam Spade, shows up very briefly indeed, as Carney's old partner, a lifetime loser now mortally wounded and gasping about a deal that would make them both rich. Enter Bill Macy as a small-time hustler who has a job for Carney, locating a kidnaped cat for a garrulous kook (played to a faretheewell by Lily Tomlin). The plot ramifies, almost instantly involving a shoot-out on the lawn of Carney's rooming house, a pummeling around for Carney at the hands of a pretty boy thug (John Considinc) on a visit to a talkative fence (Eugene Roche) who has wife troubles (Joanna Cassidy The back story Carney is trying to piece together is itself an ingredient from the tradition and here incorporates an illicit romance, a robbery staged to conceal a murder, some blackmail and sufficient double crosses to fill a cemetery, as they nearly do.

There is a ransacked apartment, a flighty but well-armed redhead lurking in the shower, a pale corpse hardening in the refrigerator and practically nobody telling the truth at any time. In all of this, Los Angeles itself is not so much an ingredient as a character, a shaping environment that still seems to have been invented by Raymond Chandler more than anyone else. "The Late Show" is not really a period piece, contemporary in fact, to judge from glimpses of late night television and the fence's goods. But Benton appears to have aimed for an undated look, or for a time-suspended feeling in which Carney in more ways than one has become a figure out of a different era. FASHION METEOROLOGIST-Bonnie Cashin, first modern designer to dress women in layers, says new weather will bring back primitive clothing ideas.

Times photo by Harry Chase pending long hot summer with less air conditioning, less water. The winter of discontent and discomfort. As the first modern designer to discover the built-in clothes thermostat called layering, Ms. Cashin could be called the fashion industry's most accurate meteorologist. Unlike her design contemporaries who have gradually lightened all their fabrics for year-round 72-degree central heating and air conditioning, Ms.

Cashin has remained steadfast to the principle that lightweight and heavyweight fabrics, properly assembled, can not only coexist peacefully but are the only way to dress for comfort. "I hate air conditioning," says the third-generation Cali-fornian, who grew up in the un-air conditioned splendor of San Francisco and migrated to New York in 1949 when apartment dwellers there could still open their windows. "And I hate the way we overheat in the winter. My apartment is so hot I can't even wear my own sweaters. "We freeze in the summer and roast in the winter, and there's something topsy-turvy about that.

It's against nature. And when man goes against nature To correct this imbalance, Ms. Cashin says we're going to have to get used to what we might now consider a little discomfort. "It's good to feel cold sometimes. It's healthy.

Our bodies Please Turn to Page 10, Col. 1 SLOOP NEWSBOY The 66-foot racing sloop NewsBoy is owned by its skipper, Jack Baillie. His crewmen average a dozen years together. Times pholo by Deris Jcanetlc MOVIE REVIEW 4Slap Shot' on Thin Ice He snarls at Macy to get some information from a cop downtown. Macy points out in embarrassment that the cop died months ago.

Here, as in so different a film as "Butch Cassidy," there is that edgy sense of men (or a mart) having strayed out of one era into another, less congenial, of having outlived a period. It lends an overtone of melancholy, which Benton converts into an even warmer affection for the Carney character. For all its obvious and careful make-believe, "The Late Show" works, as the best of the private detective stories have always worked, because there is a vivid and sympathetic central character to root for. Like Spade and Marlowe, Carney's Ira Wells is a man of honor, left battered and nearly broke by an indifferent and ungrateful world, but still honor bound to risk his life to see rough justice done, even while his ulcers bleed and the leg stiffens and his landlady (Ruth Nelson) reaches the end of her patience and threatens to toss him in the street. Lily Tomlin, a talented comedienne who in "Nashville" left no doubt that she is a gifted dramatic actress as well, creates a comical character but stops well short of being a grotesque and in the end generates a sympathy to match Carney's own.

As a romance, they are an odd couple, but it works handsomely for the purposes of "The Late Show." Macy is also finally a creature of sympathy as the smalltime loser who in the end loses big. Roche as the fence and Ms, Cassidy as his dumb but treacherous wife are expertly vivid. "The Late Show," which opens exclusively at the Bruin in Westwood today, is that nice, expert, satisfying, unpretentious little picture, the kind that they used to make and that now make the late nights pleasanter. THE VIEWS INSIDE WHITE ARCHES At the Theodore store on Rodeo Drive young clerks wear white. LUXURY Hermes' entrance is framed by limousines, ubiquitous parking meters.

Times photos by Gary Ambrose BY KEVIN THOMAS Times Staff Writer With "Slap Shot" (at the Chinese, the Avco Center Cinema 1 and the Rosecrans Drive-In), the line between the unmitigated exploitation picture made at the fringes of the industry and the major studio production with its big-star, big-budget pretensions-to-respectability becomes invisible. That its star, Paul Newman, and its director, George Roy Hill, have collaborated on two of the most entertaining and popular films of the last decade, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Sting," makes this cynical little piece seem all the more shabby and calculating. Newman is the player-coach of a third-rate ice hockey team based in a small Eastern town. The team, financially marginal at best, derives most of its support from the local steel workers, and the impending closure of the mill would seem certain to seal the fate of the Charlestown Chiefs. But the team's general manager (Strother Martin) recruits three Neanderthalian brothers.

Sparked by them and by Newman, who thinks winning will keep everybody alive, the Chiefs turn violent and become crowd-pleasers as a result. Justification of Dialogue Written by Nancy Dowd, an alumna of Smith College and UCLA's motion picture division, "Slap Shot" has the ingredients of a movie that could be both a lively entertainment and a comment upon the public's blood lust for violence in sports. Instead, "Slap Shot" uses its mill -town milieu and its third-rate athletics to justify the foulest dialogue yet heard in a mainstream commercial movie, a nude sequence that if not unwarranted plays exploitatively, and dosages of violence (mixed with mealy-mouthed protestations that violence is awful) that make the movie into the objects of its own hypocritical scorns. The pot satirizes the kettle, and Sadie Thompson complains of the low moral tone in the Tropics. As a piece of film-making it is competent but impersonal and, considered in succession to "The Great Waldo Pepper," suggests that director George Roy Hill rises to the level of his scripts, no further.

Obviously, an ice hockey team, either on the ice or in the locker room, isn't going to carry on like a Sunday school class. But since "Slap Shot's" characters possess so little Please Turn to Page 24, Col. 1 ART SEIDENBAUM Chic Marches On at Rodeo BOOKS: Howard Blum's "Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America" by Robert Kirsch on Page 7. QUBS: Firesign Theater at the Roxy by Richard Cromelin on Page 25. MOVIES: "Dogs" by Kevin Thomas on Page 30.

"Much Ado About Nothing" by Sylvie Drake on Page 28. "Lost Horizon" by Sam Frank on Page 19. MUSIC: Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich at Ambassador Auditorium by Daniel Cariaga on Page 23. Holly Lipton at Ye Little Club by Richard Houdfk on Page 22. What's Doing in Orange County on Page 16.

AND OTHER FEATURES No, he said. They're converting it to a jewelry center. Sales on all floors. Out go the people who. juggle abstract amounts.

In come the diamond cutters. The neighborhood has changed, he allowed. Rodeo Drive was just the backside of Beverly Drive two decades ago a good gallery, a Swiss restaurant, a Polynesian salad bar, a decent bookstore, even a gas station on a corner. Wil-shire was the tony street, Beverly the busy street. Rodeo was a quiet street with walkup tax consultants.

Please Turn to Page 4, Col. 1 My friendly tax adviser was obviously upset when I arrived. "Did you hear?" was the first thing he asked me. "No," I said, assuming the worst, that he and all his clients were in some sort of peril from the revenuers. "I've been evicted," he announced.

"After 20 years in this building. At the height of the tax season. With only 30 days' notice." I sympathized openly and sighed privately. It wasn't something we had misfiled during the last 18 years. "They planning to tear the building down for a higher rise?" Dear Abby Page 9 Art Walk Page 14 Bernheimer Page 20 Boutique Page 13 Bridge Page 4 Comics Page 3 1 Jody Jacobs.

Page 2 On Fashion Page 10 Dr. Solomon Page 1 2 Television Pages29 30,32.