(As it happens, the actor whose overtures she was resisting is my own father, Lyle Talbot; the scene always bothered me as a kid, because Shirley was so dismissive of him).
The breakdown left just one known bidder in the field -- a government-backed British consortium known as the Phoenix Project, whose overtures BMW rejected only Thursday on the ground that its financing was uncertain.
So far, its tactics seem to involve holding Mr. Obama out of the firing line, fashioning the subtext that he appears to be an amenable guy whose overtures toward Russia are being undermined by dark, retrograde forces.
Another prize -- the Pulitzer -- was awarded to Aaron Jay Kernis, whose "Overture in Feet and Meters" is to have its New Jersey premiere when Hugh Wolff, the orchestra's former director, returns to New Jersey after Christmas.
Samuel Goldwyn, Billy Wilder, Jerry Lewis, Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg, Harvey Weinstein, Terrence Malick, Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio are among those whose Catcher overtures have been declined.
Mr. Dawson, whose new "Overture" will have its premiere with the Dutch National Ballet on June 15, said that he was not trying to reinvent classical ballet but that the form had changed, in part because dancers are so much more physically and technically capable today than a few decades ago.
It is unlikely much to change Israel's relations with Syria, whose timid peace overtures over the past year or so, to curry favour with the United States, have been rebuffed: Israel is in no hurry to return to talks about giving back the Golan Heights, which it occupied in 1967.
Plague is the sequel to Penumbra: Overture, whose protagonist, Philip, went to Greenland after receiving a mysterious letter from his presumably deceased father.
Nonetheless, with the exception of George W. Bush, whose administration spurned Iranian overtures after Sept. 11, every president since 1979 saw it in America's national interests to try and mend relations with Tehran.
Weinstein told her that she was making a huge mistake by rejecting him, and named an actress and a model who he claimed had given in to his sexual overtures and whose careers he said he had advanced as a result.
Phelps specialized in the poetry of Robert Browning, to whom Ives dedicated an overture and whose verses he set in quantity.
