Word: eunuch
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...there was Chee-Chee, the musicomedy made from Charles Pettit's witty, bawdy Son of the Grand Eunuch, which Lew Fields produced in 1928. Lew Fields's son Herb, who wrote the books of several of their early hits, was sold on the Son of the Grand Eunuch, talked Hart into liking it, the two of them talked Herb's father, all three talked Rodgers. Rodgers believes it had the best score he ever wrote, that what killed it was the idea itself: "You just can't talk about castration all evening...
...nearing the age of 75, he retired. As head of a news-gathering agency whose 1,400 newspaper members make it one of the two greatest in the world, Frank Noyes for 38 years had carefully avoided expressing opinions on public questions. "Circumstances compel me to be an intellectual eunuch," he explained...
...idea of a harem is the one frequently pictured in comic cuts, in which a worried sultan or equally worried eunuch is completely surrounded by a bored beauty chorus. Proud purists who know enough to pronounce harem "hareem" may have suspected that this picture was misleading. After conning Mr. Penzer's careful study of the Turkish harem as it once flourished in Constantinople, they can be sure...
...paradise but a woman's world, "governed with the utmost deliberation and care, not by a man at all, but by a woman." That was the Sultan Valide, the Sultan's mother. No. 2 was neither man nor woman, but the Kislar Agha, the Chief Black Eunuch, "the most feared, and consequently the most bribed, official in the whole of the Ottoman Empire...
...harem's boom days (16th Century) the Chief Black Eunuch bossed some 600 to 800 of his kind; the Sultan Validé headed 1,200 women. Of these the Sultan legally married only four, but might go a-roving among the other 1,196. To pass the time, the women-in-waiting sometimes amused themselves with the eunuchs (who were of three types), sometimes with each other. Palace plots were common, and occasionally the Sultan cleared the atmosphere by wholesale drowning. That at least one of these occurrences was of fairly recent date is indicated by the story...