Word: debonaire
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Individual Style. All in all, says Fuess, his 40 years were a golden age of headmasters. There was witty, debonair Lewis Perry of Exeter, hulking N. Horton Batchelder, "a grand old stalwart, who built Loomis School into a distinguished institution," and Frank L. Boyden, who, "with his love for horses and antiques, his Yankee shrewdness, his aversion for public speaking, his passion for telephoning and automobiling, his unaffected simplicity combined with benevolent despotism," built Deerfield Academy (enrollment: 470) out of a tiny local school with only 14 students...
...prince has never given up his pursuit of those pleasures. As a dapper, rakish fin de siècle student at the Sorbonne, he got the nickname Cur Non (Why Not?) because of his debonair pursuit of food and fun. (He added the "sky" a few years later when the Czar's fine fleet came to visit France.) In 1921, already famed as a gourmet, he began to write his masterpiece, France Gastronomique, in 28 volumes. "When you're searching for good places to eat in provincial towns," wrote Curnonsky, "see the doctors, the cabdrivers and the priests...
...ceremony began at 11:45 a.m. An hour before, dingy Caxton Street was alive with London housewives, camera-clicking tourists and Whitehall office workers out for midmorning tea. Fierce, embarrassingly fierce, feminine cheers greeted the handsome bridegroom as he arrived, looking middle-aged-blithe and debonair in a dark blue suit, famed Homburg hat and white carnation. "He's not every girl's cup of tea," go iped one feminine appraiser. "Divorced, dear, and fifty-five." Her companion tattled back: "But he's so distinguished...
...soon as the ad appeared in The New Yorker last fall, all eyes were green in Manhattan's ad alley. "The Man in the Hathaway Shirt" depicted a white-shirted, debonair-looking fellow who was given a peculiar air of distinction by a black patch over his right eye. The ad was the inspiration of British-born David Ogilvy, 41, vice president of Manhattan's Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, Inc. He got the idea from pictures of ex-Ambassador Lewis Douglas, who has worn a patch ever since he lost the sight of one eye in a fishing...
...helped to foster such notables as James Joyce, Aldous Huxley. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser and Eugene O'Neill. They also became trademarks of the "lost generation" along with hot jazz, bobbed hair and the hip flask. Mencken lashed out at the "booboisie" with a bull whip; the debonair Nathan was content to use a swizzle stick. In the eyes of the proper-minded, the two iconoclasts were unholy terrors. A couplet of those days went...