{"id":3425,"date":"2005-08-01T22:02:45","date_gmt":"2005-08-02T02:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=3425"},"modified":"2022-03-22T12:19:09","modified_gmt":"2022-03-22T16:19:09","slug":"rosalind-russell-5-the-gambling-russell-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=3425","title":{"rendered":"Rosalind Russell 5: the gambling Russell family"},"content":{"rendered":"

Excerpt from Life Is a Banquet<\/a>\"\"<\/i>:<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

And in the background my relatives were yelling, “Get your money up, get your money up, it’s all cash here …”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Do you know those people?”<\/p>\n

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