Word: ginned
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Belle Livingstone, ninetyish, exuberant, high-living hostess who gave a gold-faucet elegance to the era of bathtub gin as the manager of a string of high-bracket ($5 a drink for "Jersey champagne"-grape juice and ethyl alcohol) Manhattan speakeasies; in New York City. Belle maintained (in Belle of Bohemia, a wildly inventive autobiography) that she was discovered under a sunflower in Emporia, Kans. by her foster parents, married four times and spent money faster than she could inherit or divorce it. She called her saloons "salons," outfitted them with overstuffed divans because she felt too many heads...
...Short--and, for Williams at least, is a second-rate work. The story concerns itself with Baby Doll, a delicious but nearly brainless child of twenty, who is legally though not in fact the wife of Archie Lee Meighan, a middle-aged owner of a broken-down cotton gin. Goaded beyond endurance by his wife's refusal to consumate the marriage, Mieghan takes his revenge on the world by burning down the Syndicate-owned gin which has put him out of business. At that point, the competition, in the form of Silva Vacarro, the Sicilian manager of the Syndicate, moves...
...fourth grade." In the next room a balding, slack-jowled, middle-aged man, still dressed in frowsty pajamas even though the day is half gone, stares lewdly through a peephole at the sleeping girl. This is Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Maiden), the owner of a beat-up old cotton gin. who has just been put out of business by the competition of an interstate syndicate...
...mincing insistence and with Archie's slobbering acquiescence, has not been consummated because Baby Doll, who is 19. does not yet consider herself, as she daintily phrases it, "ready for marriage." Frustrated in both business and pleasure, Archie goes berserk one night and burns down the syndicate gin. The rest of the picture describes, with a degree of Priapean detail that might well have embarrassed Boccaccio, how the syndicate's manager (Eli Wallach) gets his revenge; he not only seduces Baby Doll, but persuades her to give him evidence that it was Archie who burned down the gin...
...straight highways and the winding side roads, fast automobiles and trucks sped on late-night runs from close-to-the-border cities in Missouri and Texas. Artfully dodging police prowl cars, they slipped into Tulsa and Oklahoma City bringing bootlegged Scotch at $7 a fifth, vodka at $5.50 and gin at $5. Admiring the tinsel, feeling the cold, buying the whisky (in gift decanters), Oklahomans knew that the Christmas season was in full swing...