Word: chic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Coward's greatest single gift has not been writing or composing, not acting or directing, but projecting a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise. He had it as a newcomer of 25, when he walked into a fashionable party where all but he were in formal dress, took in the situation at a glance and said reassuringly: "Now I don't want anyone to feel embarrassed." He has it still, dapper in a brown dinner jacket, hand elegantly holding aloft the perpetual cigarette, answering a request for a definition...
...Please expliquez (in one-syllable English words, of course) to us crude, unlettered, simplistic, insensitive, baffled and somewhat defensive middle-class folk from the outback why it is chic to dissent, but merely gauche (or is it camp?) to dissent from dissenters...
...defense of romantic love when she described the female mind as "an erogenous zone." But her observations get lost in her incessant chatter and frequent malapropisms. For a time she referred to things she found attractive as "gauche" until she finally learned that the word she wanted was "chic." Editing one of her own lines in Myra, she struck out the word "germane" and substituted "superfluous...
Consider Barnett Frummer. He is a radical for love's sake who finds himself stuck to the hot asphalt pavement after going limp while protesting housing discrimination. He is the hapless yearner for un-chic Rosalie Mondle, who might one day paint "Get Out of Vietnam" across his chest. He is the groping incipient gourmet (trying to out-cook his friends) who dreams that he is accused of eating Fritos. He is the poor chap who cannot get invited to those with-it parties Rosalie attends, "where whites gathered to be castigated by some prominent Negro." Says Barnett...
THERE were drag queens mingling with society matrons, rock 'n' roll blasting through the halls where Rembrandt and Velasquez once reigned in hushed glory, and costumes ranging from fringed buckskin to China Machado chic. "Peace Now" buttons blossomed on satin evening gowns. Pamphlets denouncing David Rockefeller, Viet Nam and the art market were dispensed along with cocktails and tiny sandwiches. Outside, pickets protested the lack of black and women artists in the show. Manhattan's venerable Metropolitan Museum had never before been host to anything quite like it, a fact that was duly lamented by diehard traditionalists...