Word: cordelia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Happiest Millionaire was Philadelphia's Anthony J. Drexel Biddle (1874-1948). Kyle Crichton, who helped write My Philadelphia Father with Biddle's daughter Cordelia, has rerouted the biography for the stage. Certainly this most redblooded of bluebloods, most warm-hearted of hotheads, most brotherly-loving of eccentrics-who turned teetotaler and collected alligators, boxed with professionals and gave a voice recital without having a voice-cried out to be a stage character. The stage problem, plainly enough, was to give some sort of connection to Father's disconnected crazes and sudden whims; the stage difficulty...
...flowers, a scrap of music, a patch of sky. In Author Böll's deftly understated handling, all that might be mawkishly sentimental in Andreas' goodbye to life develops instead the percussive pathos of Lear's grief-crazed cry over the body of his daughter, Cordelia. "Never, never, never, never, never!" Into this intense reverie of earthly leave-taking floats human driftwood from the general shipwreck of war. A cuckolded buddy runs his tongue over and over the story of his wife's infidelity with a Russian as if it were an empty tooth socket...
...CORDELIA P. KENDALL Towson...
Complete Man. By the time Anthony Biddle died (in 1948 at 73), he had seen his son and ring protégé Tony become an ambassador and a colonel. His grandson, Cordelia's boy "Angie" Biddle Duke, later served as Truman's envoy to El Salvador, the youngest ambassador in U.S. history (36 when he was appointed). Though Biddies still proliferate in Philadelphia's social register, Cordelia has switched from the Main Line to Manhattan. The result is that My Philadelphia Father, "as told to" Kyle Crichton,* reads like ripsnorting, Bull Moosish commotion recollected...
Though there are glimpses of the many-mansioned world in which Cordelia grew up, the ponderous, plunging figure of the colonel dominates the book. "He was an elemental force," says his daughter. "At any time in his life one could point to him and say, 'There is a complete...