Word: menckenisms
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...wonderful example of the high hamming that is equally the forte of skilled actors and skilled trial lawyers, it makes Muni and Darrow indistinguishable. Ed Begley's Bryan is excellent also, though this is a more benign figure at the trial than the Bryan who, as H. L. Mencken watched him, "writhed and tossed in a very fury of malignancy," and not quite so benighted a figure as the Bryan who actually contested the fact that man is a mammal...
...papers that he was able to start the Sauk-Prairie Star in Sauk City, Wis. in 1952. Editor Gore filled the Star with tried-and-true reader-catching personals, a homespun "Star Dust'' column, and two columns of editorials under a good-humored standing slogan (H. L. Mencken's "Every little squirt thinks he's a fountain of wisdom"). The Star's circulation climbed to 3,200, and the paper turned a neat profit...
Hatrack & the Countess. When Henry Mencken fought the Watch & Ward Society and was arrested in Boston for selling the issue of his American Mercury that contained the story of a casual prostitute called Hatrack (she took her customers to cemeteries*), Mencken retained Hays. When the Countess Cathcart was denied entry to the U.S. because she had had an affair with the Earl of Craven (the Earl was admitted without a fuss), Hays was at her side. In his autobiography, City Lawyer, Hays recalls that when the Countess was brought before a deportation board of inquiry, she asked: "But haven...
Romance came at last to Broadway Critic George Jean Nathan, 72, iconoclastic sniper-in-arms (in the '20s) of H. L Mencken. Announced Nathan, from Manhattan's Royalton Hotel, where he has lived as a bachelor for 48 years: he would soon marry wraithlike Actress Julie Haydon, 44, with whom he has been keeping company for 17 years. Julie last appeared on Broadway nine years ago as a wispy cripple in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. "The best woman," Nathan once wrote, "is the inferior of the second-best man . . . To enjoy women at all, one must...
...London Daily Mirror, biggest daily (circ. 4,535,687) in the world, owl-shaped, sharp-tongued William Neil Connor, 45, is the hardest-hitting and most-quoted columnist in Britain. Cassandra combines the terrible temper of a Westbrook Pegler with the calculated irreverence of an H. L. Mencken. "It is a pity," Sir Winston Churchill once said, "that so able a writer should show himself so dominated by malevolence." Even his own paper often finds his comments hard to take, but suffers them because of his circulation-building appeal. Says Mirror Editorial Director Hugh Cudlipp: "Cassandra disagrees with almost everything...