The inspiration for Billy ”You look maahvelous!” Crystal`s celebrity reporter on ”Saturday Night Live” was Fernando Lamas, he says in the September Playboy. The character came to him when he heard Lamas say, ”You look marvelous, John,” on ”The Tonight Show.” Johnny Carson then said,
”Well you look great, too.” To which Lamas replied, ”I`d rather look good than feel good.” ”I got hysterical,” recalls Crystal. ”When I brought Fernando to `Saturday Night Live,` `You look marvelous,` became sort of a catch phrase. The other day, I ran into a 2-year-old doing it in the supermarket.”
Speaking of marvelous, the title of a collection of theater reviews by London Sunday Times theater critic James Fenton, is ”You Were Marvelous”
(Merrimack). Fenton has no qualms about trashing a play or the material on which it`s based. He goes after T.S. Eliot, some of whose poems form the basis of ”Cats.” ”Eliot is not the sort of poet who reaches the stage of maturity, after which everything he composes has a certain quality,” Fenton states in his review of the smash hit. ”One day he writes a masterpiece. The next day he is doodling. In `Old Possum`s Book of Practical Cats,` Eliot is doodling.”
When Cindy Williams, Shirley to Penny Marshall`s Laverne, took a three-year hiatus to begin raising her daughter Emily, she occasionally wondered if she`d ever work again. ”That demon poked his ugly head up from time to time,” says Williams. ”It`s good for everyone to grapple with the idea,
`What if it did happen? Could I be a waitress again?` If it came to it, I probably could. I used to be a waitress. I was happy when I was a waitress. If I had to, I like to think I could do it again.”
REPLAYS
”I thank God for high cheekbones every time I look in the mirror.”
–Suzy Parker
”Beauty is like being born rich and getting poorer.”
–Joan Collins
”Sit by the homely girl; you`ll look better by comparison.”
–Debra Moffett, Miss America, 1982.
