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In tonight's martini the part of gin and vodka will be played by white rum.

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White rum from Puerto Rico will finally play the role its distinctive clarity and smoothness have so well prepared it for.
In fact, white rum has already proven itself in rehearsal. It beat gin and vodka on taste and smoothness in a nationwide test. That’s because all white rum from Puerto Rico is aged for at least a year-by law.

White rum is ready to take a leading role in the martini.
Like any new star all it needs is a chance.

PUERTO RICAN RUMS [[image]]
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BACKWARD GLANCES

Laurette Taylor in "The Glass Menagerie"

by William Marchant

When enthusiasts of great acting get together, those with long memories will inevitably name Ina Claire, the Lunts, the Barrymores and, whether they understand French or not, Edwige Feuillere. Disputes are likely. A certain English knight is thought to have made a better Hamlet than another, and those old enough to have seen Sybil Thorndike as Saint Joan or Maude Adams' Peter Pan will defend their heroines heatedly until they are hoarse. 

But when Laurette Taylor's name comes up, her Amanda in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie is generally conceded to be the single finest performance ever given by an actress, at least within memory. It is now exactly thirty years since this miracle of theatrical art was on view at the lovely old Playhouse on West 48th Street. I was present in the last row of the second balcony on the opening night, March 31, 1945, as I was several times throughout the following week and frequently during the rest of the play's run. I always had the sense of attending a great occasion, of being witness to an event of nearly historical importance.

To begin with, the play itself was a revelation, beautifully crafted yet novel in technique, like a series of disconnected memories shaped into coherence by a poet. And the production - Jo Mielziner's arrangement of walls that were sometimes transparent, of chairs that had upstage arms but none downstage, dappled with patches of light as if clouds were passing overhead in a fragrant breeze - was the ideal environment for the genius of Miss Taylor to work its wonders.

Coming events have never cast such lengthy shadows beforehand. Laurette Taylor was recovered from a long illness and was triumphant once more; the news came from Chicago, where the late Ashton Stevens had proclaimed her work in the tryout of the Williams play as "the performance of the century." (A rival critic remarked, "Well, he's old enough to have seen all of them.") But no amount of advance press-agentry had prepared the first nighters for what it would be like, and I have never read an appraisal of her performance that conveyed anything of its effect, as I have never seen words that explain what it is like to look up at Michelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel for the first time.

"What did she do? I was asked by a famous English actress years after the fact, and I could only say, "Not very much . . . She merely was." The great beauty merely shook her head in bewilderment and added, "That's what they all say."

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True, she clutched at her skirt several times in the second act, apologetically, because the periwinkle-blue gown she wore showed its age, and, yes, she held the telephone receiver as though she doubted that anything could be heard through it, and once I saw her eyes flash straight out at somebody in the audience when she heard a laugh in an unexpected place.

Her performance was always informed with a sense of the unplanned, or surprise, as if every word addressed to her came as a discovery or a disappointment. And her