Word: hedonistic
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Died. Cinemactor Errol (Captain Blood) Flynn, 50; of a heart attack; in Vancouver, B.C. A carefree hedonist who recently described himself as a man who had "seen everything twice," he was a sort of U.S. saloonfolk hero to movie fans who once made him one of the ten biggest box-office draws. Born in Tasmania, where his zoologist father, an Australian, was a lecturer at the University of Tasmania, Flynn, blessed with quicksilver wit and a steel physique, was a glass-jawed boxer with a good right, a global Jack-of-all-trades, and a freebooting South Sea sailor before...
...required many servants, researchers, a Tuscan villa with a vast formal garden in which to "taste the air." Hearing that he had his watch warmed to body temperature by the butler every morning before he strapped it on his wrist, impatient folk inclined to dismiss Berenson as a lucky hedonist. But he was really an ascetic in reverse who worked untiringly at sipping the ephemeral sweetness of things. His garden drew from him a typically overtrained, anxious and caressing response: he found the lichen "as gorgeous as an Aztec or Maya mosaic," and the moss "of a soft emerald that...
...tells five short stories, is at its best in the two that star Vittorio De Sica: as a count who has lost everything but his nobility ("I'd decided not to outlive my youth no matter how rich I was"), and as a Naples bus driver, a laughing hedonist who has developed a talent for catching and lifting girls' skirts in the bus's snapping-jaw folding doors. Since it is the bus driver's conviction that the routes of heaven are not to be found by following a regular schedule, he is always ready...
...Social historians could do worse than examine this obituary for evidence of how Hemingway has influenced a whole generation of child actors who have tried to live in the image of his heroes. The book is shot through with the sentimental stoicism of the Hemingway man, and with the hedonist worship of the "art of living," which calls for everything just so-the old-fashioneds must have a touch of honey, the mustache scissors must be of 18th century French make, even the final, fatal razor must be a Rolls...
...Shangri-La was never quite so dreamlike as life in Laos since that country became an independent nation 2½ years ago. With the French no longer directing its political life, the unwarlike people of this Buddhist kingdom in the interior of the Indochinese peninsula relapsed into their old hedonist ways. Though Laos is practically roadless, well-to-do Laotians bought Mercedes cars and Italian scooters (with U.S. and French aid), built showy riverside houses, idled their days away in the pagoda gardens listening to Panpipe music and watching the graceful Thai dances. But a peck of trouble...