card dollar for that i'm joined by david leavitt's from our culture desk hi david so it's been a long time since he saw fame in the fifty's in the sixty's why does p.r. cut off still matter to us now well he was such a formative figure back in the thirty's in the sixty's the stars were winding up to wear his clothes and he dressed elizabeth to dress john who he was also involved with by the way and he also dressed the beatles in the net roots style jackets without collars without look has nothing really to distract from their mockery. and they brought that style to the west so he was really he was a designer with an enormous star power or whose designs when we ship the era you can say if the beatles still influenced today involves us today and certainly so does he what made his design stand out from his contemporaries. well i like older more conventional designers blake corrosion back in the 1950 s. who were trying to accentuate the body she wasn't interested in the form of the body he saw it more as something to put his designs on top of like sculptures he actually likened. the body

tonight, author david leavitt shares his humble opinion on the importance of this daily memento. >> everyning, after i've iad some coffeo the new york times crossword. i can't say that this is always or even usually a pleasure, because it isn't. yet the need-one might even call the compulsion-to get t crossword out of the way never abates. even on election day, i did the crossword. even when i was in the hospital recovering from emergency appendectomy, i did the iossword. the questiant to pose now, as much to myself as to other crossword junkies, is why. in my case, the answer to this question, like the answer to most questions, is my mother. where the times crossword was concerned, she was both an aficionado and an intellectual hlete. for example, she could do the crossword in pen-she rarely ha to erase anything-and on occasion without looking at the down clues. i have enshrined an image of my nither sitting at our kitchen table in calif the times open before her, calmly entering letters into the grid.er in 1985, my moied-a sudden one, for she had been fighting cancer for many years. whe