Word: madman
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...imperialist spy. In court he cracked: "If I had been a spy, dozens of countries could have closed down their intelligence services-there would have been no need for them to have maintained such a mass of spies." He was executed, and replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, a madman who carried on the slaughter to the point where millions of Russians were dead or jailed. Yezhov, often styled "the beloved pupil of our leader and teacher Stalin," had his own group of pupils, among them a fat, pallid young man named Georgy Malenkov. After two years in office, Yezhov disappeared...
...Chicago, a center of the U.S. television industry, old hands catalogued brash, upstart young Earl W. (for William) Muntz as merely another California screwball when he invaded their city and their business four years ago. They knew that "Madman" Muntz's zany advertising, depicting himself as a lunatic in a Napoleon hat ("I buy 'em retail, sell 'em wholesale. More fun that way!") had made him the used-car king of Los Angeles. But they assumed that the tough TV business would soon drive him really crazy...
...industry is not yet willing to grant that the Madman, or his Muntz TV Inc., is here to stay, but it has long since concluded that he is just as mad a success in TV as he was in used cars. Last year his TV company grossed $49.9 million and last week Muntz, now 39, announced that he is ready to invade a new business, air conditioning. Two years ago he bought the tools, dies and inventory of Tropicair Air Conditioner, plans to turn out a half-ton conditioner listing at $239 and a three-quarter ton unit...
...decided to stake his whole profit on promotion, turned himself into the Madman. His billboards, with their mad legends ("I wanna give them away, but Mrs. Muntz won't let me. She's crazy.") and his singing commercials made his name a California gag. Red Skelton, Bing Crosby and others kidded his commercials, the University of Southern California rooting section spelled out his name at halftime, and soldiers at Santa Ana Camp marched into chow singing "MUNTZ, that's Muntz." And his gross jumped from $150,000 to $1,000,000 a month. Dissatisfied with car design...
Richard Wagner rates the fattest dossier in Slonimsky's book-27 pages. He was called, among other things, a Communist (in 1855), a madman and a eunuch. Slonimsky himself believes that, for pure vehemence, criticism of Wagner has seldom surpassed that of the German historian, J. L. Klein, who wrote in 1871 of "the diabolical din of this pigheaded man, stuffed with brass and sawdust, inflated, in an insanely destructive self-aggrandizement, by Mephistopheles' mephitic and most venomous hellish miasma, into Beelzebub's Court Composer and General Director of Hell's Music-Wagner...