Word: morbidities
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...remaining 79 years of his life, Calouste Gulbenkian caught precious few glimpses of gutters, particularly since in young manhood he developed the habit of sprinting from a rented limousine to the door of his destination in morbid fear of assassination. As he became a legendary oil financier and fabled art collector, Gulbenkian also kept on collecting what he most loved: money. When he died in 1955. his five-shilling piece had grown to an estimated $420 million, his annual income to $14 million...
...ever intenser stimulants to create even the illusion of feeling. Stepping up the tempo, "go, go, go" becomes the rhythm of madness and self-destruction. The future of the Beat Generation can be read in its past-the James Deans and Dylan Thomases and Charlie "Yardbird" Parkers-and the morbid speed with which its romantic heroes become its martyred legends...
...Vienna before World War I, the maddest celebrity in town was Oskar Kokoschka. His morbid plays dramatizing strife between the sexes set off bitter café debates; his portraits turning the light on the psychological "inner life" of his subjects outraged complacent burghers. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne (whose assassination at Sarajevo in 1914 triggered World War I), gave it as his opinion that "this fellow's bones ought to be broken in his body." After the war, which dealt Kokoschka a head wound and a bayoneting, the artist moved to the front rank of avant...
...painting at 16, insists "an artist should remain anonymous," keeps within the realist tradition. He snaps back at those who attack his studies of young girls as Freudian and sinister with: "Maybe it is the people who look at them, and not my paintings, that are sinister, erotic and morbid...
...room in New York with his mistress and dreams of the day when death will free him to marry her. When the mistress becomes pregnant, James resolves to divorce Annette, but face to face with the supine, trusting invalid, he holds his tongue. The memorable story evokes a morbid doll's house in which death is pink with black edges, like some outrageous hybrid flower. Also outstanding: the thumbnail sketch of the prim, man-hating aunt, who all but says out loud that a marriage in which sex is prohibited by doctor's orders is a noncon-summation...