Word: levant
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sugar Candy. Oilman Getty, 64, is one of the least known among the world's oil giants, usually breaks into the press only with news of his marriages and divorces (five of each). An expatriate, he lives in hotel rooms from Europe to the Levant, has little social life, usually eats alone and frugally, wears out-at-the-elbow sweaters. A notorious penny pincher, he passes out tips sparingly, constantly grumbles about the high cost of everything from restaurant food to taxi fares. But he freely pays thousands for such hobbies as his private art museum (Rubens, Titian, Gainsborough...
Lebanon (pop. 1,425,000). Smallest Arab country, officially half Christian and half Moslem, the cultural and commercial center of the Arab Levant. Pro-U.S., and less hostile to Israel than any other neighboring state, Lebanon alone among the Arabs has so far refused to break diplomatic relations with Britain or France...
Dyspeptic Pianist Oscar Levant and his local TV show (Words About Music) were scuttled by Los Angeles' station KCOP after Levant began neglecting music to make off-color comments on such interesting compositions as Marilyn Monroe and Richard Nixon. Moaned his ex-sponsor: "The show got too dirty. We want to sell carpets, not controversies." Confessed Wit Levant: "I was outraged at my taste . . . I'm like a middle-class James Joyce-extremely-self-conscious. The station left it up to my own judgment, which I don't have...
...Communist, mercurial, spaniel-eyed Marshall is no Briton either. Of Spanish origin, his family migrated from the Levant to Singapore, where his father Anglicized the Hebrew family name, Mashal (meaning parable). Born in 1908, young Marshall went to Singapore's St. David's School, suffered malaria and tuberculosis, sold automobiles, went to London to study law, and set up as a barrister in Singapore. A member of the Singapore Volunteer Force in World War II, he was taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1942; his fellow prisoners remember his determined cheeriness in a Hokkaido camp in which...
Whatever the Kremlin's motives, its pronouncement had lightning results in the Levant. "The end of an illusion," wailed a Beirut newspaper. "Arabs can no longer play East and West against each other." In Cairo the newspaper Al Ahram denounced the Russians for "meddling in the Middle East." "Iniquitous," cried Syria's Defense Minister. "The U.S.S.R. lumps aggressors with victims." And in Israel old David Ben-Gurion, sniffing the air, shed his khaki battle dress and turned up at work wearing a nonbelligerent white shirt instead...