1974 Glamour

"Speaking of Ava, her full name is Ava Cherry and she was one of my back-up singers on 'The Midnight Special' TV show I did for American television. She's cute and a really talented singer and she's just been signed by MainMan which, as you know, is also my company. I'm going to work on her first single with her and it's sure to be fabulous, 'cos she's got such a great voice, really powerful and dynamic. She's also a terrific looking girl and I'm sure she's destined to be a star. Remember, you heard about Ava here first!

"Chris Evert was such a sweet 16 when she burst onto the national scene. With ponytail flying on the grass courts of Forest Hills, N.Y., this unseeded high school girl from Florida made three gripping comebacks against established women pros -- including once staving off six match points. While she didn't win the 1971 U.S. Open, she earned a more valuable prize that fortnight."

"As anyone who owns a cat (or has seen THE UNCANNY) will tell you, felines do not perform well on film, largely because they're almost impossible to train. So when the first scene of PERSECUTION involved a whiny, irritating mammy's boy drowning his domineering mother's beloved moggy in a bowl of milk, the old 'bad movie alert' alarm bells started ringing in my brain. Not just because the scene is tasteless and cruel, but because it's one of the least convincing, most poorly staged and technically inept set-pieces I've ever seen."

"I was wrong. After the milk-sodden opening salvo, we fast-forward twenty years or so and find the cat killer as a dysfunctional, nerdy adult, played by a convincingly awkward-looking Ralph Bates. Or maybe he just had acute constipation at the time. Anyway, he's now married and has an infant son, and all three are living unhappily with mother, who has had a long string of possibly evil pet cats, all called Sheba, all neatly buried in the garden maze, and all of which may or may not have been killed by Bates."