Word: clef
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...Grand Rapids, Minn., and Lancaster, Calif., for fragments of the true Judy. The authors emerge with gossip about Frances Gumm, whose vaudeville father was a homosexual and whose mother sought vicarious recognition in her child star. For Dahl and Kehoe The Wizard of Oz is cinéma à clef; the Dorothy who sang Over the Rainbow was the actress herself. "Frances never stopped trying to get home," they burble in a style that Rona Barrett might envy. Young Judy covers only the childhood of Garland's 47-year-long life and is only about one-fourth as egregious...
...French tycoon. Dolores nets a $10 million marriage contract-but nothing more. On their wedding night, the Baron leaves his weeping bride alone with her 60-carat diamond ring for the bed of his true love, world-famous Ballerina Ludmilla Rosenko. Susann denies that Dolores is a roman à clef but adds: "If Jacqueline Onassis sees herself as Dolores, she will admit I made her a warm, sympathetic person...
...additions or subtractions, the group can star in any political adventure. But Wicker's characters, however stereotyped they may be, do have one saving grace: they are not a collection of disguised Hubert Humphreys, Barry Goldwaters and Arthur Krocks. Facing the Lions is in no sense a roman a clef. The characters are, if not Wicker's own, at least the inhabitants of the imaginary world of political fiction...
...earnest overpraise, he under stands that Maugham did create several stories that are still read and several characters who are fondly remembered. Most memorable by far is Rosie, she of the pale gold hair, white breasts and happy promiscuity, whose enchanting smile suffuses Maugham's celebrated roman à clef, Cakes...
...there is a dispute between two characters: Henri and Dubreuilh. It is in this novel, and within it alone, that the dispute between the characters centered on the question whether or not to publish a report on Stalin's labor camps. In viewing this novel as a roman a clef, there has been a temptation in certain quarters to identify Henri with Camus and Dubreuilh with Sartre. But as Simone de Beauvoir, the author of the novel, has clearly stated in her autobiography La Force des Choses: "Henri, whatever people may have said about him is not Camus...