Word: middlebrows
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...Goldwyn-Mayer. This most galvanizing of actresses was the most passive of stars. At MGM's urging, the young Garbo slimmed down, had her teeth capped, adjusted her hairline. Her most enduring studio ally was her doting cinematographer, William Daniels. Garbo must have felt comfortable, surrounded by MGM's middlebrow high gloss. She may not have cared that its gentility suffocated her films, so long as she could breathe her artistry into them...
...previous American artist had touched both highbrow and middlebrow in this way, and few would manage to do so later. Church was an inventive showman. Heart of the Andes, more than 5 ft. by 9 ft., went on view in a trompe l'oeil architectural frame built, literally, like a picture window, so that one sat down on a bench and had the illusion of gazing from a Victorian living room into sublimity, complete with palms, parrots and Andean campesinos adoring a cross. If his other paintings prefigured CinemaScope, this one was the ancestor of the big-screen home...
...idea is not new. Several U.S. periodicals devoted to the journeying reader emerged at the turn of the century, including the forefather of what is today's Travel-Holiday, owned by the Reader's Digest. That magazine now has a circulation of 800,000 and remains a sedate, middlebrow Howard Johnson's sort of enterprise. The new action is exemplified by the current industry leader, American Express's upscale Travel & Leisure, a 17-year-old that is still growing briskly, with a circulation of 1.1 million and advertising revenues of $39.5 million. The host of followers has been drawn...
...California vernacular. Things he likes, from his family house in suburban Maryland to the flowering of capitalism in the Third World, are "really neat." He is proud of his erudition, using French phrases like elan vital, but he sometimes tosses out strange neologisms, like "braggadocious." His tastes are unabashedly middlebrow. He saw the musical Les Miserables three times and with characteristic gusto has become a one-man ad for the show, telling people that "it's the best musical since Man of la Mancha...
...subjects of his paintings, was having an affair with his model? Or could it be that Betsy's public hint of that affair was part of an elaborate strategy to woo media attention and thus inflate both the price of the works and the value of Wyeth's middlebrow eminence? There were no immediate, incontrovertible answers, but the story's hold on the popular imagination proved that Wyeth is still the one artist whose style and personality can tantalize America. Through cunning or coincidence, Wyeth is a singular mixture: old master and master showman...