Word: diana
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Traded Tiara. Diana's mother was a legendary beauty, Blanche Oelrichs Thomas, also known as Michael Strange in her spare-time incarnations as poet and author. It was in Carder's, where she was trading her diamond tiara for a rope of matched pearls, that she met Actor John Barrymore-"the most beautiful man that ever lived," said she, "like a young archangel." But their unangelic love affair was like "a tennis match in Hell." More than three years later, Blanche Thomas, defying the warning cries of her friends and the exigencies of the Social Register, divorced...
Parsifal on the Capehart. When Mummy finally stumbled out of her marriage to John Barrymore, she married Wall Street Attorney Harrison Tweed, returned to the Social Register and determined to make a lady of Diana. The girl was sent to Miss Hewitt's Classes (where "the Astors and Vanderbilts always voted for each other in class elections"), to the Brearley School and to Garrison Forest, where her father wound up in a necking session with one of her schoolmates. ''You look like a clown riding to a circus!" Mummy would scream if Diana hit an off note...
...Diana made her debut in the 1938-39 (or Brenda Frazier) season, and by way of guidance "Mother had made it clear that a young lady never slept with a young gentleman unless it was understood that she would marry him." However, the first young gentleman with whom she sought to follow Mummy's advice soon married someone else. From this point on. Author Barrymore carefully chronicles several lovers and three husbands. First in the trio was British Actor Bramwell Fletcher. 17 years her senior, who liked to sit at home painting and reading. Husband No. 2 was Tennis...
Daggers from Faye. Next, crabs began to crawl over Diana's bedroom ceiling ("Can you get DTs when you're only thirty?"). A heart attack carried off husband Bob, leaving Diana at the mercy of strong-minded Dan Freeman, her summer-stock leading man. Dan led Diana to a children's playground, murmured: "Come on, baby, sit in the swing . . . You're a sick girl. Diana . . . You are going to get to God." Instead. Diana found Dan massaging her back, crooning gently: "Ei-lu-lu, Bab-en-u. Ei-lu-lu-lu-lu. Baby...
This chronicle is saved from its own shoddiness. and sometimes even becomes compelling reading, because of a kind of innocence and spoiled-childishness amid the trash. After losing a TV job (to Faye Emerson) because she showed up drunk for the first show, Diana muses with a terribly revealing naivete: "For months, everywhere I looked, stories and interviews and photographs of Faye Emerson leaped out at me. Her name was like a dagger. You fool, you idiot! It could have been you on the cover of Look, of Cosmopolitan . . . It could have been...