Word: humorless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...have spent apart. Gerald's only daughter has married a slack-spirited intellectual snob. His younger son is a BBC television personality whose public pitch is heart-tugging interviews with the wronged; privately, he is enamored of a blackmailing, homosexual spiv. Gerald's elder son is a humorless business tycoon who keeps two sets of emotional books: in one, a grim and proper wife; in the other, a toothsome, pseudo-bohemian mistress. This illicit affair is almost a parody...
Helen is a beautiful, poised, glamorous costume designer, aged 35 (no change in 23 years). She is a widow, but not even her scriptwriters know who her husband was, or what ever became of him. Helen never tells. She is invincibly pure, relentlessly humorless (because her fans want heartthrobs, not laughs). Once, seven years ago, she walked uninvited into the stateroom of a man she had just met on shipboard. Faithful listeners were scandalized. Helen is now allowed to wear tight skirts and low-cut gowns, but she neither smokes nor drinks. Helen's enemy, Gossip Columnist Daisy Parker...
...wealthy landowner, he early learned to sit a horse and boss his father's peons. The landowning politicians of Chile's 19th century- Conservatives who disputed for power with equally conservative Liberals- molded his beliefs to the right. The Chilean cavalry gave him a passion for humorless order; Chileans say that once, for reasons of pure esthetic tidiness, he made a tall clarinetist in a military band trade instruments with a short trombonist...
...Crown into a lasting winter of discontent? Can the couple's 13-year-old son Tony grow into a healthy, normal American boy after he peeps through the cottage blinds and sees his mother in the arms and bed of his 20-year-old counselor-companion Jeff? Is humorless, self-contained Oliver to blame for it all be cause he treats his Hartford, Conn, printing plant as a religion and his wife as a hobby? For the answers to these and many other related questions, tune in to Lucy Crown, a bit of fictional hokey-pokey in 21 chapters...
...thinning grey hair is worn at ordinary, not Claghorn, length, and he shuns the string tie and the diamond stickpin. Taciturn and humorless, he has neither the gift nor the inclination for the vivid rhetorical attacks on opponents that were the stock in trade of such old masters as South Carolina's Ben Tillman, who won the voters' hearts by announcing his determination to go to Washington and plunge a pitchfork into the rump of President Grover Cleveland. Where Theodore ("The Man") Bilbo embarrassed respectable Southerners with personal peccadilloes, ranging from a particularly messy divorce to brazen bribe...