Word: charlatanism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Great Act. It was after he got out of jail that Means staged the greatest act of his career. In 1932, the Lindbergh-baby kidnaping sent the nation reeling with shock. The fat, dimpled charlatan got in touch with Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean,* owner of the famed Hope diamond and estranged wife of the Washington Post publisher. She was a friend of the Lindberghs, and of course would be overjoyed if she could help find the baby. Just leave it to me, said Smiling Gaston. All he needed to turn the trick was $104,000 ($100,000 for the kidnapers...
...House's most notorious absentees: he has responded on the average to less than half the roll-call votes over the last decade. All this has contributed to the feeling expressed last week by one disgusted colleague: "He is a demagogue, a high liver, a playboy and a charlatan.'' Said another: "I don't know exactly how you decide who's the worst Congressman, but Adam's certainly in the finals...
...World War I. To his military superiors he was a popinjay. To the Arabs he was Sheikh Dinamit, the spirit of the wind who led them to victory over the detested Turk. To Biographer Richard Aldington he was a cad and a bounder-sado-masochistic, hemi-homosexual, selfpublicizing charlatan whose actual role in the Arab revolt was small and whose subsequent career as a technician in the R.A.F. was merely a theatrical gesture of humility. To Winston Churchill he was "one of the greatest beings alive in our time," a man of vast abilities who could write (Seven Pillars...
When the pratfall and pie-in-the-puss comedy tires him, Comic Wisdom resorts to a genus of comedy that in seven films (all hits) and numberless TV shows he has failed to master: pantomime. While allowing himself to be duped by a charlatan of a music-hall star (played to seedy perfection by Jerry Desmonde), he lisps, giggles, gawks, grimaces, mugs and burbles. "Aggressive," is his psychiatrist's diagnosis at film's end. "I think you'd better grow up a little...
...ends as a smutty soap opera badly in need of soap. It is notable largely for the crass calculation with which author and publisher can manufacture an almost certain bestseller, as well as for one of its few serious points, made when Dr. Chapman is denounced as the egocentric charlatan he is: "You speak of love in numbers. Human beings are hardly numbers at all. No numbers can add up devotion, tenderness, trust, pity, sacrifice, intimacy...