Word: bruff
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Zita Heinmuller, 19, appeared to be the next glamor girl to be trumpeted to literary fame for a fee. Brass-lunged Trumpeter Russell Birdwell (who puffed Nancy Bruff's The Manatee into a brief bestseller) worked on beauteous Zita bright & early: before Zita started her book. The new authoress, daughter of the president of the Longines-Wittnauer Watch Co., Inc. ("the world's most honored watch"), dashed off an outline, flew off to Havana to begin padding it out. Declared Birdwell: she would have the help of "research workers" who were beautiful models. Book's title: Park...
Born. To Nancy Bruff Clarke, 30, sightly authoress of bawdy, briefly best-selling Manatee, and Edwin Thurston Clarke, 51, Manhattan investment counselor: their first child, a son; in Manhattan, the day her first volume of poems (My Talon in Your Heart) was published. Name: Thurston Bruff. Weight...
...Manatee, a tale of love and whaling-men ("Violent . . . corrosive. . . . Jabez Folger['s] soul was possessed by an evil demon. . . ."), was the year's freak success. Nancy Bruff, wife of a Wall Street broker, hired crack Press Agent Russell Birdwell to put over her first novel. With a nude heroine in the form of a ship's figurehead enlivening its cover (see cut), and pretty Author Bruff. décolletée, enlivening its advertising. The Manatee soared high on best-seller lists...
Last week The Manatee was published. The critics fell on it like harpooners. Groaned the N.Y. Times: "All the faults of the born non-storyteller are here in heaping measure. . . ." Said the N.Y. Sun: ". . . no order, no command over her material, no style . . . Miss Bruff has run away from too many schools...
Nothing daunted, Button's & Birdwell went on sending out movie-like Bruff art (see cut) and Bruff blurbs. Last week, the results began to come in. One week after publication, The Manatee had sold 52,000 copies. (Author Bruff's cut: $24,000.) The Manatee had also been accepted for the Armed Services Edition. Both Button's and Nancy Bruff were already well on their way to getting their investment back-and then some. Even book reviewers began to see things in a new light. Said the persnickety New Yorker: "... a first novel by a writer...