Tricia's 'Fast Eddie' Isn't Talking

What can you say about a 24-year-old Harvard Law student who's marrying Nixon's daughter and who won't say anything to anyone?

That he, Edward Cox, is handsome (ca. 1956) and charming as he stands in the doorway of his sixth-floor Mass Ave apartment that he won't let you into for fear of giving you "personal" information.

Yes, you (reporter) stand in the dreary brown and green, linoleum-tiled hall, the flickering fluorescent lamp reflecting off his short dry-look, blonde hair and his noncommittal gray eyes. And of course, the blue pin-stripe shirt, the navy club tie, the not-quite pointy black shoes.

You can say that he is liberal, an original Nader's Raider, a summer writer for the New Republic. He will say nothing more. He already seems to have acquired Nixon's phobia of the press.

No Paul Newman

Edward Ridley Finch Cox. Princeton '68: his mother traces her family line back to one of the drafters of the Decla-ration of Independence; his father a senior partner of the Manhattan law firm of Cox, Treanor, and Shaughnessy. Or Fast Eddie (of. "The Hustler"), a sarcastic nickname given to him by fellow students at the Trinity School, a private New York prep school, because he didn't swing like Paul Newman.

Fast Eddie meets Tricia. From adolescent scorn to the American Dream. They meet at the Chapin School Christmas dance in 1963, and after a short seven-year courtship the romance has bloomed. She visits him for a weekend every fortnight at Harvard. (His apartment is conveniently across the street from the Holiday Inn where Tricia can rest, safe from temptation.)

Beware!

The American Dream. Or maybe the super cop-out. Liberal law student marries Maddox-admiring, Spiroesque Tricia. Muffled beneath her pink and pastel dresses and white lace she says, in response to the Agnew press critiques, "Never underestimate the power of fear."

What does Ed have to say about Trish? Nothing, of course, which perhaps says something.