Word: muriel
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Human Relations. In 1914, the golden age ended for Europe, and for Muriel. Paul, who fancied himself a judge of horseflesh, came home from the Derby to announce, "All the money is gone . . . The last went this afternoon." Said Muriel: "Will you have a cup of tea?" A year later, Muriel gathered up Paul Jr. and young Sanders, who had been born in London, and came back to the U.S. There she divorced Paul Sr., and settled down to make a living by interior decorating...
...next few years, Muriel's income was small and irregular. (She later claimed she lost about $35 on every decorating job she did.) But in a succession of shabby East Side New York apartments, generally furnished with a few gilt chairs and remnants of the splendors of 19A Edith Grove, she once again became a famous hostess. By 1929, when she published Music at Midnight, a lively memoir of her European triumphs, Muriel's parties were a focus for visiting artistic lions and earnest contributors to the little magazines. Muriel helped to keep excitement alive by outrageous remarks...
...1930s, however, the prime pastime at Muriel's New York parties ceased to be music. Now, like many another patron of the modern arts, Muriel began to discover "the creative impulse . . . in the field of human relations," i.e., Communism. In 1934, she went to the U.S.S.R. "to see firsthand the Russians' new way of living." Three years later, she made a visit to embattled Loyalist Spain, where she discovered that when she looked at a Spanish worker or peasant, "we could both know that we spoke the universal language of truth...
Still Chic. Returning to New York, Muriel cast the cloak of her social and artistic background over a host of Communist intellectuals and pro-Soviet organizations. After World War II, all the intensity which she had once devoted to arguing the merits of Beethoven or Gertrude Stein was given over to stock denunciations of "fascistic tendencies" in the U.S. and stock praise of life in the U.S.S.R. By 1949, still chic, still full of zest, she was president of the Communist-fronting Congress of American Women. The House Un-American Activities Committee in its report of that year gave Muriel...
Last week, with the golden days gone, 65-year-old Muriel Draper died in New York's University Hospital, after nearly two weeks of suffering under an oxygen tent. With her was her dancer son, Paul Jr. Two years before, during his unsuccessful libel suit against Greenwich housewife Hester McCullough, who had labeled him pro-Communist (TIME, June 5, 1950), Paul had attempted to explain his mother -and in so doing had characterized quite a lot of U.S. intellectuals and their hangers-on. Said he: "She has made statements that are not so. They are not lies . . . They...