Word: cowardly
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Moscow diplomats circulated another (probably apocryphal) footnote to Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech. As Khrushchev told sobbingly how the peerless leader had actually been a killer, coward and sadist all along, a written question was handed up to him. He read out the note to the assembled Party Congress: "What were you doing when Stalin was alive?" Said Khrushchev: "There is no signature on this note. Will the author please stand up?" No one stood up, so Khrushchev said: "I will count to three. Then let the author rise." He counted to three, but no one stood...
Only Playwright-Actor-Producer Noel Coward managed to give the door a backspin. After two shows (Together with Music, Blithe Spirit), Sponsor Ford Motor Co. decided Coward was "too sophisticated" and vetoed his third show, a version of his 1943 play Present Laughter, scheduled for May. Said Coward amiably: "If they don't like it, I'll do another for them. After all, I've written 26 plays and it shouldn't take long to whip out a new one." Mollified, Ford settled for a TV interpretation of Coward's superpatriotic This Happy Breed...
...playwrights only Shaw is placed above suspicion of shoddiness, and the long arm of an O'Casey grudge can reach far back to cuff an offender ("Pinero . . . turned the wine of drama into water. A miracle, a miracle!"). Three pieces are devoted to the demerits of Noel Coward, whose works are finally summed up in two words (of George Jean Nathan's): "zymotic bilge." As for the "flea minds" of Ireland who are not properly reverent to their self-exiled bard, "these critics do not injure O'Casey, but they disgrace Ireland." He feels...
...infinite complications that develop when they try to cover the misfortune, which they figure is best done by earthing old Harry on top of the hill, are inevitable. The script Hitchcock uses is in the manner of a very garrulous Noel Coward, lacking a great deal of the sponteneity and verve which make salon situation humor tolerable. Funny verbal exchanges might have saved the endless repetition of burying Harry, digging him up, and then burying him again. Poor cold Harry must not have been amused...
...Edward March Campbell) was himself a Marine Corps noncom.* wounded three times, who won a D.S.C., Navy Cross and Croix de Guerre, and had every right to the bitter pity with which he wrote his novel. Among its 113 characters, every military type is represented-the good soldier, the coward, the goldbrick, the rank-happy shavetail, the lucky and the wound-prone. Each is caught in one lurid moment of his life, as if March had composed by the light of a Very pistol...