Word: corking
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Broadway, as a song-& -dance man, Holtz was a flop. He flopped again as a comic until he got the idea of telling his Jewish stories in blackface, clicked in vaudeville, climbed to George White's Scandals. Later Holtz abandoned cork for a cane, made vaudeville history by playing the Palace for ten straight weeks. The stockmarket crash dropped him "from a million to $732"; the decline of vaudeville drove him to pastures new; but after a dozen years of musicomedy, radio, Hollywood, show-producing, real-estate trading, today he has most of his million back...
Warmed by the sun, cooled by the fierce, antiseptic mistral, favored by commerce and the sea, the land had bred a human race tolerant and amused. Now the Provencals joined in with the invaders to drive the German from their land. Along the shore among groves of cork oak, on the hills where pines tinged the air with the clean smell of resin, Frenchmen fought alongside the swiftly advancing troops of Major General Alexander M. (for McCarrell) Patch, U.S. commander of the Allied Seventh Army...
Founded four years ago, the American Negro Theater wants, above all, to deal realistically with its race. "With few exceptions," it insists, "plays about Negroes have been two grades above the minstrel stage-the cork is missing, but the spirit is there." Many of the company, including Actress Simms, have been at universities but never on Broadway. Most of them are war workers who have kept the A.N.T. alive with a slice of their earnings. Last April, however, the Theater was saved from shoestringing along for a while by a $9,500 grant from the General Education Board...
After the Germans invaded France (machine-gun "rays . . . made . . . deep incisions [in] the loathsome yolks of eggs fried in boiling oil") Count Grandsailles was sent to Casablanca by the Vichy Government. Vichy thought he was loyal. But the Count was chiefly interested in planting more & more cork trees. "All I want," he told the admiring North Africans, "is an Arab revolt within 48 hours." "You shall have [it]," cried Communist Professor Brousillon, "but it may cost the lives of several Communists...
...ended, the Count sped back to France. But his demoniacal visitations had given Solange "convulsions that racked her . . . with euphoric climaxes." "He is coming!" she cried. "Wait just one last moment before nailing me down!" Meanwhile the Count's heart "contracted at the sight of the young cork [trees] that had grown during his absence." Though Solange had died, the Count knew that the pulse of France was beating as strongly as ever-"the truffles truffled . . . the snail slavered, the manure manured, the cemetery rotted, the preserves preserved, the rabbit's blood dripped...