Word: muchly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Seldom has a melodrama flashed so many tricks of the trade-pianos, radios, telephones, striking clocks, blinking lights, swinging doors, even false statements in the program. Yet The Closing Door is much more seriously written than the usual thriller and is full of clinical detail and therapeutic advice, some of it Freud and some of it scrambled. If this adds to the weight of the play, it only proves, in terms of good melodrama, a dead weight. Toward the end, however, as the adolescent events that poisoned Vail's life emerge simultaneously with the frightful method he took...
Even so, it is a gruesomeness that frays the nerves rather than tingles the spine. The Closing Door is not particularly boring; it's just not much fun. Something unpleasantly oppressive about the play is accentuated by something peculiarly awkward in the playwrighting. Actor Knox, with his very low-keyed but believable performance as Vail, proves Playwright Knox's strongest ally...
...opening would include Actress Alexis Smith, oldtime Star Gloria Swanson, Eastern Air Lines President Eddie Rickenbacker, R. H. Macy's Beardsley Ruml, David Rockefeller and Julius ("Cap") Krug. But none of the party-goers would enjoy the round of banquets, swimming parties and tennis tournaments as much as their party-loving, party-giving host, Conrad Nicholson Hilton, the world's No. 1 hotelman, who this week was getting his first excited look at his newest hotel...
...relative newcomer to the corporation, who managed the Stevens before Hilton took over. Hilton's son Nick, 23, is learning the ropes from them (his other sons by his first marriage, Eric, 16, and Baron, 21, are not in the business). Hilton lets his managers run things pretty much as they please. He merely sets the targets. When he bought the Palmer House, he installed Binns as manager, told him: "This place should net another $600,000 a year." Then he took off for the Coast, leaving Binns to figure...
...month. When Williford saw the chance to make $18,000 a year by renting out small showcases, known as vitrines, in the lobby, he wired Hilton for an O.K. Hilton wired back: "I don't know what a vitrine is, but if they'll bring in that much, put them in." In the Palmer House, a bookstore that was paying a rent of $250 a month was replaced by a cocktail lounge grossing $2,000 a day. Employee locker space was centralized, making space for 50 additional rooms. In Hilton's first year, the Palmer House...