New York Times, Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Not long ago I rewatched Baz Luhrmann's take on "Romeo + Juliet" starring a very young Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. Set in a fictitious but thoroughly modern "Verona Beach," the movie is true-ish to Shakespeare with the Montagues and Capulets at war, swords and knives replaced with a lot of guns, and of course "a pair of star-cross'd lovers." A fun movie if you haven't seen it.

It made me wonder though if we'd ever seen star-crossed lovers crossed up in a crossword puzzle. This was all the more interesting since I noticed that STAR CROSSED LOVE is 15 letters long. If I ran this phrase across the middle of a puzzle, could I find sets of star-crossed lovers to go in each of the four corners?

Let me tell you, there are a lot of options! John Lennon and Yoko Ono would do. But then so would Clark Kent and Lois Lane. Or Janet Leigh and Spencer Tracy. There's also Burns-Allen, Cash-Carter, Geller-Green and Butler-O'Hara!

The trick was to find couples who were real star-crossed lovers, whose last names could be crossed, and hopefully who could be set up symmetrically in a grid. BURTON-TAYLOR fit the bill, and it just so happens that their names fit symmetrically right across from BEATTY-BENING. (Although in fairness Burton-Taylor was a famously rocky relationship while Beatty-Bening have been together for years.)

BOGART-BACALL was another obvious choice. But here the symmetry failed me. In the original version of this puzzle, I did have a solution: I used Clyde BARROW and Bonnie PARKER in perfect symmetry across from BOGART-BACALL.

The problem of course is that all of the others are actors and actresses who are/were together on and off the screen. Bonnie and Clyde were real-live people who have been portrayed in the movies, but it just wasn't consistent with the rest of the theme. So we went with PITT-JOLIE instead, damn the symmetry. And so far, damn the "star-cross'd"-ness. They're still together, right?

Gordon gives us some STAR CROSSED LOVE, using four pairs of famous actors literally crossing each other in the grid. I've highlighted them below in case you missed them.

It was great to see pairs that were easily recognizable even to this pop culture idiot. It's hard to avoid seeing stories about Angelina JOLIE and Brad PITT, and Humphrey BOGART and Lauren BACALL are uber-famous. Even Warren BEATTY and Annette BENING rung a bell. I couldn't figure out who TAYLOR was, but some research shows that of course Elizabeth TAYLOR was a gigantic star, along with Richard BURTON.

I would have loved some symmetry in the pairings. That would have been difficult though, perhaps even impossible given the constraints of crossing the two names at a common letter. Perhaps it could have been achieved by using lesser-known stars? But that would have lessened the impact for many solvers, just as my not figuring out who TAYLOR was made that pair less interesting than the others for me.

It was also a little odd to see STAR CROSSED LOVE, rather than STAR CROSSED LOVERS. Too bad that the latter is 17 letters! Even a slight expansion of a normal 15x15 grid couldn't accommodate that. I wonder if simply STAR CROSSED would have been better. It would have made the grid much more difficult to construct, forcing placement of four black squares right off the bat, but I do think STAR CROSSED is a more natural-sounding phrase.

What with all the themers Gordon had to work with, I think he did a good job with his grid. It might not seem that hard to work around those pairs, given the total flexibility to place any of the four pairs into any of the four corners, but trying to incorporate four sets of crossing answers — plus a central 15! — means you have to work around a ton of heavily-constrainted areas. A bit of A BITE and A RUN and the odd ENSOUL, but to keep it to just that made for a smooth solve.