Word: mama
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...martini, after which she smashed a few cocktail glasses. Arm in arm with Jacques ("I marveled at this physical intimacy''), she lived it up till 2 a.m. ("I found myself tossing off a créme de menthe") and then reeled home to mother. Mama was up, and in tears. She feared, says Simone, "that Jacques had dishonored me." Short years before. Mama de Beauvoir had pinned together pages or whole chapters of books which she considered unseemly for proper young girls. When Simone inadvertently discovered that George Eliot's unmarried heroine in Adam Bede was pregnant...
Parental Clay. In the France of 1908 -such a well-tended garden that it was almost a crime for a child to pick a flower -the De Beauvoirs tried to maintain rather than seek status. A soso lawyer. Papa was worldly, intelligent and a gifted amateur actor. Convent-bred Mama was pious, temperamentally capricious, and terribly afraid of making a social gaffe. When the couple engaged in loud-voiced wrangles, little Simone was bitterly disillusioned; parents were not gods, but common clay. At eight, the embryo novelist wrote a woefully sentimental saga about The Misfortunes of Marguerite...
...existentialism. Even travel, which ought to have broadened her mind, merely served to harden her. Thus, thinking Communism good, she went to Red China (The Long March) and found it a paradise; thinking the U.S. bad, she found America, Day by Day a demihell. The purity fetish instilled by Mama de Beauvoir has given Simone's intellectual life unquestionable integrity, but it also makes every clash between the ideal and the actual an emotional crisis. At the bar of reality, Simone is still a one-martini girl...
...songs are also-rans, though the trumpet-tonsiled Merman voice is always in the winner's circle. Jerome Robbins' dance spoofs are designed to show how funny-awful vaudeville was, and by sheer glut and garishness turn pretty gaudy-awful themselves. A Mermanly try at playing up Mama's spunk and jollifying her sadism fails when the script itself belatedly acknowledges that Mama is a bundle of neuroses and no fun to be with. Sandra Church's Louise is poignant and luminous as she works free of sister's shadow and mother's wing...
...answer was not blazoned on the marquee. The answer: Ethel Merman. They all love Ethel, but the love is sorely tested in her latest role as the most monstrous stage mother ever seen on stage. Gypsy is inspired by Gypsy Rose Lee's autobiography, but Ecdysiast Lee remembered Mama with the same refined, opera-length-glove finesse that she brought to her stripping. Mama played by Merman is forbiddingly, tiresomely brassy, a kind of Orpheum-circuit Medea. At curtain's rise, Mama Rose has already devoured three unshowbusinesslike husbands and is panting to staff the vaudeville stages...