Rosalind Russell 5: the gambling Russell family

Excerpt from Life Is a Banquet:

I love this story. No wonder men not only fell in love with Rosalind Russell, but they just loved her – in general:

We children would be up on the third floor — we had a billiard room there; my father played billiards, not pool, and to this day I can shoot so well, people think I must have earned my living at it — playing games and racketing around over my mother’s head, while she sat downstairs doing those name tapes. We had turned an alcove on the third floor into a bowling alley, and we also had a pool table.

My poor father, he never made a bet in his life, he didn’t approve of betting, and he brought up a bunch of gamblers. After he died those of us who were still in school used to come home at different hours — sometimes just for weekends — and there was always a crap game going in my father’s library. My mother permitted it, and stayed to supervise. The dice were going all the time, and I remember arriving late one Friday night and having a chum of one of my brothers, a young man who didn’t know I was a member of the family, warn me against the Russells. “Do you know those people?” he whispered. “Be careful, they’re all sharp shooters.”

And in the background my relatives were yelling, “Get your money up, get your money up, it’s all cash here …”

“Do you know those people?”

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1 Response to Rosalind Russell 5: the gambling Russell family

  1. Stevie says:

    How about the story when she’s hired as a counselor at a girl’s camp by telling them she’s the mistress of the Greystock Stables – then proceeds to spend the summer staging Shakespears on horseback!

    I love the innocence. It’s charming. It’s beautiful.

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