Word: fowlerize
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...late Gene Fowler was a thinking man's John Wayne. In half a century behind the typewriter, he built a name as a swashbuckling reporter, a capable novelist, a prosperous Hollywood script doctor and a painstaking biographer of such romantic rascals as John Barrymore (Good Night, Sweet Prince) and Jimmy Walker (Beau James). In the course of his career he became something of a romantic rascal himself, a legendary prodigy in bar and bedroom alike...
...Fowler boomed out of Colorado in 1918, a tall, ruggedly handsome frontiersman who had earned his journalistic spurs on the brassy Denver Post. He soon became an ornament on William Randolph Hearst's New York American, along with Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner. Fowler's style was purple but compassionate: when Ruth Brown Snyder and her paramour Judd Gray were electrocuted at Sing Sing in 1928, his account of the execution-reprinted in full in this book-was a bitter indictment of capital punishment...
...career gave Fowler happier opportunities. He accompanied Queen Marie of Rumania across the U.S., apparently to the Queen's great pleasure. Later, in Hollywood, he was said to have been at the top of Mary Astor's list of skilled lovers. His monumental benders were even more famous, escapades that featured highball-to-highball confrontations with such stalwarts as Barrymore, Ben Hecht and Jack Dempsey...
...this same Fowler was also a devoted family man who remained married to the same patient and adoring woman all his life and who raised a family that cherished him. When a friend judged his biography of a notorious Denver madam too indelicate, Fowler retrieved the manuscript from an astonished publisher and burned it. When he died in 1960, a convert to Roman Catholicism, Fowler was the friend of countless priests and prelates...
Humorist H. Allen Smith, a longtime friend and fellow jackanapes who died last year, records these contradictions with bemusement and affection. He attempts to separate Fowler facts from Fowler fiction, but it does not really matter. As was Fowler himself, this parting toast is full of warm summertime laughter...