Word: counihan
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Anita Colby, née Counihan, was 30 last August. She has never married, and the chances are that she never will. This is obviously not for lack of looks. Years ago her good friend Quentin Reynolds gave her a permanent nickname : The Face. Her good friend Voldemar Vetluguin, a one time editor of Redbook, has called it "the most beautiful face this side of Paradise." (He added: "And the sharpest tongue this side of Hell.") And until she got tired of the work, this seraphic property made her the highest-paid model in America...
Father & the Facts of Life. Anita is the daughter of the cartoonist Bud Counihan, a legendary figure among New York artists and newsmen. A handsome, impulsive, lace-curtain Irishman, he had an indefatigable affability, a great love of good fellowship and good liquor. He was loved as only a man can be whose weaknesses are at once amiable and unaggressive. Settled in Brooklyn and prospering on the New York Evening World, Bud Counihan made many of the friends who were later to give his daughter her start in life...
...friend, Quentin Reynolds, almost the only friend she had in New York then, took her to a 53rd Street bistro just coming into vogue, the Stork Club. There, while Reynolds waited for a friend, Anita haltingly sipped an orangeade. The people she met were all fond of Bud Counihan; they found it, now, remarkably easy to be fond of his girl Anita. In a matter of weeks her friends had increased from one to 201; in a matter of months, Bud's beautiful daughter was the toast of the town...
From then on, Anita Counihan was to live almost exclusively among celebrities. Almost any night she might be found surrounded by one or all of her Stork Club gang: talking over his experiences in Spain with Ernest Hemingway or their experiences anywhere with Westbrook Pegler, Peter Arno, Damon Runyon, Steve Hannegan, John O'Hara; dancing at El Morocco with Dan Topping and Shipwreck Kelly; dashing out to the country to help Deems Taylor compose a new operetta. Between times there were play or ballet or opera openings with the William Rhinelander Stewarts, the Orson Munns, Prince Serge Obolensky...
Colby does the preliminary planning on clothes for every picture, making sketches which give the designer the gist of what Selznick is looking for. ( She had five years of art study; Bud Counihan is still convinced her real talent lies in art.) She has well in mind, before she starts, what each star can wear: "Bergman is something so beautiful you must play it down. You cannot overpower Ingrid with clothes." "Make Fontaine smart, feminine and refined." "Keep Shirley looking sweet sixteen with soft hair, pigtails and girlish pinafores...