Word: gardenias
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Gardenia in Hair. Fortnight ago, eleven days after being released (72 days off for good behavior), Billie made her comeback in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall. It was jampacked (300 were seated on the stage) with a crowd of Holiday cultists whose hysterical applause gave the event the quality of a revival meeting. They were telling their martyred Billie that nothing mattered, just so she was back, and that for their money (up to $3.60 a head) she could do no wrong...
Made statuesque by her 30 added pounds and sporting as always a great white gardenia in her glossy hair, Billie took her homage like a queen. Her voice, a petulant, sex-edged moan, was stronger than ever although she had done no singing at the reformatory. Seemingly tireless and with only three days of rehearsal behind her, she sang 32 numbers, mostly cultist favorites like Billie's Blues, All of Me, Fine and Mellow, and the throat-tightening Strange Fruit...
...pageant of ritual dramas and folk plays, heard scratchy Ch'ing Dynasty blues and a half-dozen pieces by a "classical orchestra"-an ensemble that was ancient when Confucius was young. Though Broadway-farers made little sense out of the dancelike dramas, they liked the sword dance by Gardenia Chang, the gaudy plumage, rooster-strutting and extravagant simpers...
...expanded into other enterprises. Example: he turned his summer home at Fortin into a hotel, enticed tourists with a gardenia-filled swimming pool, has made the resort almost a tourist must. Ruiz Galindo weekends in Fortin, does business in bathing trunks at the pool's edge. In Mexico City he lives in new, garish Lomas de Chapultepec, the suburb of the newly arrived bourgeois...