Banner Graphic, Volume 12, Number 48, Greencastle, Putnam County, 2 November 1981 — Page 4

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The Putnam County Banner-Graphic, October 31,1981

People in the news Tried to ease Presley's habit r doctor testifies

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) A doctor charged with overprescribing drugs to rock 'n' roll stars Elvis Presley and Jerry' Lee Lewis says he only administered drugs to his patients to relieve suffering and infirmities. Defense attorney James F. Neal had planned to have Dr. George Nichopoulos spend most of Friday facing crossexamination. But Criminal Court Judge Bernie Weinman cut off the testimony after the defense rested at noon Friday, leaving cross-examination until Monday. The move was requested by Assistant District Attorney General Jewett Miller, the chief prosecutor. The trial has lasted a month. Nichopoulos, 54, Presley’s physician for 11 years before the entertainer’s death Aug. 16, 1977, is charged with nine counts of prescribing illegal quantities of amphetamines, sedatives and narcotics for Presley and eight other patients. Two counts accuse him of prescribing addictive drugs for Presley and Lewis without making an effort to control their addiction. Nichopoulos spent about two hours on the witness stand Friday, stepping down after declaring that the drugs he gave Presley were part of a good-faith effort to control his patient’s drug habit. The doctor acknowledged writing a series of letters to drug companies in 1976 and 1977, asking for placebos harmless substitute tablets for some of the pills Presley was taking. The defense has argued that Nichopoulos was trying to control Presley’s drug intake. Shelley Bruce, the 16-year-old former star of the Broadway musical “Annie,” is under treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common form of childhood leukemia. Miss Bruce, who succeeded Andrea McArdle, the origial “Annie,” and played the role for 13 months before leaving the show in 1979, has been at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center since Oct. 20. She is in the “induction therapy” stage of her treatment, which will last four weeks. This stage of the treatment includes intravenous and oral chemotherapy to produce a remission of symptoms and signs, a hospital spokesman said. She should be able to return home after a month, but will continue treatment that will last two to three years. Dr. Michael Sorell, one of Miss Bruce’s physicians, said Friday that acute lymphoblastic leukemia, known as ALL, “has a very good prognosis, with a 65 to 75 percent chance of long-term cure.”

'Carbon Copy' off and running

George Segal:'Fashion fossil'success

c. 1981 N.Y. Times News Service NEW YORK movie star under the age of 80 and some who are over to go to places like the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Room dressed in a shirt open to their navels and nothing around their necks but a chain bearing a Maltese Cross or something equally ponderous. Not George Segal, who on screen and off acts his age. “I’m a coat-and-tie actor,” he was saying here recently, “which makes me unique these days. How many actors can you think of who go through nearly an entire movie wearing a coat and tie? Unfortunately, it limits the number of roles I’m offered.” But if Segal feels like something of a sartorial fossil, he needn’t worry. He wears his coat and tie in “Carbon Copy,” and it’s one of the most engaging comedies of the year. In it, the star of such memorable films as “A Touch of Class,” “Bye Bye Braverman,” “Blume In Love” and “Where’s Poppa?” again plays the slightly weak, very harried button-down type he’s so good at. Only this time he’s harried by a street-smart black teenager who shows up in his office one day claiming to be his son, the product of a long forgotten biracial college romance. The boy, dynamically played by newcomer Denzel Washington, manages to get Segal fired from his job by Jack Warden, his father-in-law boss, and divorced by his snooty wife, Susan Saint James. From living in a posh suburban home and driving a com-pany-owned Rolls Royce, Segal finds himself reduced to a one-room shanty in Watts and shoveling out stables to support himself and his son. But he also finds himself as a man. Segal personally joined in the talent search that brought Denzel Washington who will remind moviegoers of a young Sidney Poitier to the screen. “I’m always surprised at how good I was when I started in this business,” Segal reminisces, “but not as good as this kid is at 22. When I was 22 I was doing Richard Conte imitations. Now I guess I’m at the stage of getting father roles. Well, I never had the hot rock crowd with me, anyway.” Segal comes by his Brooks Brothers personality honestly. His father became affluent by going into the hops and malt business just after Prohibition. His brother continues the business and is an expert at blindfolded beer-tasting, while Segal himself knows his way around the various brews. Brought up in Great Neck, Long Island, he attended a Quaker school in Pennsylvania and went on from there to Haverford College and ultimately Columbia University, where he got his bachelor’s degree. There he discovered his lifelong passion for the banjo which he gets to strum a bit in “Carbon Copy” and formed his own group, esoterically known as Bruno Lynch and His Imperial Jazz Band. Like sometime jazz clarinetist Woody Allen, Segal still performs professionally it’s his only contact with live audiences these days and recently gave a concert at Carnegie Hall. “I guess I’m just a song-and-dance man who can’t sing or dance,” he modestly says. “I have an old vaudevillian’s approach to my profession. Movies are an art form, and I’m happy to be a part of it.” So unlike Allen, whose love-hate relationship to moviemaking has not exactly endeared him to Hollywood, Segal feels at home in Beverly Hills, where he lives with his wife Marion, a film editor who worked on “Carbon Copy” as well as the earlier hit, “Fun With Dick and Jane,” and their two teen-age daughters, Elizabeth and Polly. “I simply feel that if I’m going to live in Hollywood, I have

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PRESLEY: Habit uncontrolled

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) Veteran actor Keenan Wynn says vanity prevents many people from wearing hearing aids and that’s "pretty silly.” “Can you see that?” the veteran actor asked Friday, pointing to his left ear. Then the bearded Wynn took out his hearing aid. “I’m deaf the same as someone else.” For the 65-year-old actor, the stage Friday was a hallway in the building housing the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s speech and hearing clinic. It was one of the stops he was to make in Omaha and Lincoln over the weekend on behalf of the Sertoma Clubs of Nebraska. • c. 1981 N.Y. Times News Service The Army’s highest-ranking woman, Maj. Gen. Mary Clarke, retired Friday at the age of 56, after a parade in her honor at Fort McLellan, Ala. General Clarke, a native of Rochester, N.Y., recalled in an interview earlier this week that she had entered the service as a private during World War II “to do something for the war effort.” “My intention was to serve for the duration of the war plus six months, as specified in my enlistment contract,” she said. She later decided to stay because a male commander had told her she probably could never make it through a grueling officers’ training program. “That did it,” she said, and she went on to serve 36 years, the longest Army career of any woman. She was the last commander of the Women’s Army Corps before it was consolidated into the regular Army in 1978.

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SEGAL: Coat-and-tie actor

to live by their rules. Woody has bought the right to his attitude by living and working here. You can’t really be a movie star in New York, but out there you’re a movie star or nothing.” Early in his career, Segal played Biff in “Death of A Salesman,” but nowadays he tends to keep offstage. “There’s more tension in the theater because you’re on your own. What I love about movie acting is that each film has a creative family backing you up. “The leading lady is always your sister, and we all love each other. But then, when the movie wraps, there’s the brutality of its being all over.” Perhaps only a man as genial as Segal could stay married to his own editor, whom he met when she was a story editor at CBS. “Marion always threatens to cut me out of my own movies,” he laughs. “But after all, when I’m playing a character, I don’t understand the film as a whole until it’s all over. I can talk about the quality of acting and if the movie was cast well and the tone is right. But only the editor is in a position to judge the final product. “We’re both professionals, so Marion’s editing hasn’t interfered any with our marriage.” Segal’s one big worry about his career in general and “Carbon Copy” in particular is that “people don’t want to see movies about the privileged,” an observation disproved by Dudley Moore’s “Arthur,” about the most privileged lush in New York. “Also, you have to make people feel good in a comedy, and you only have an hour and a half in which to do it.” An ambition the actor has long nurtured is to play one of Saul Bellow’s harassed, nice-guy, coat-and-tie heroes. But since it’s unlikely that anyone in Hollywood is burning to bring our most distinguished novelist’s work to the screen, he’s happy playing less complex parts like Walter Whitney, the middle-class hero of “Carbon Copy. ” “Maybe some books are better off just staying books,” he shrugs philosophically.

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