Word: papa
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...against the current of modern art. The stepson of a rich St. Petersburg banker, Berman was left homeless at 18 by the Russian Revolution. Settling in Paris, he was enchanted by the "Blue Period" paintings of another alien, Picasso, 18 years older than Berman. By that time, restless "Papa" Picasso was gaining notoriety as a cubist; but Berman, along with his brother Léonid, and his friends Tchelitchew and Bérard, thought cubism something to keep clear of. Their idea was to go on from where Picasso's Blue Period left off-to paint, in a traditional...
...school, Paul-Henri was erratically brilliant. Once, when he flunked an exam, he forestalled punishment by declaring: "I have already administered to myself the full flow of reproach which a boy in my situation usually gets from Papa and Maman" Spaak's culture is essentially French, and his early heroes were French. He was particularly keen on Napoleon until, in his own words, he "became aware that it was compromising for a politician to admire Napoleon too much...
...after Papa had lost his considerable cotton fortune in Savannah, he took a job as manager of a cotton agency in Le Havre. Mamma did wonders with his small pay and her almost total lack of French. The children born in France had to ask others what Mamma said when she scolded them in English, though both parents tried to "prevent us from becoming expatriate mongrels." As the years passed, easygoing Papa became fairly well off and brought his family to a comfortable home in Paris. But it was Mamma, tiny and handsome, who staved off the early crises...
...right, lovey-dove, you seem a shade less stupid than your sisters." Stupid or not, they all wanted to know about Oscar Wilde, who had just completed his prison sentence in England for immorality and could be seen drinking his absinthe at the Cafe de la Paix. Papa advised that they be enlightened in 20 years. Eleanor, the loveliest one, first accepted, then jilted English Novelist Arnold Bennett. Writes Anne: "A chit was throwing over a good heart, a fine brain and an emerald ring, all belonging to a literary gentleman of some prominence, aged thirty-nine...
...parents, though they never returned to the U.S., firmly refused to think of themselves as expatriates. The children, too, still consider themselves Americans. Papa, unable to get bourbon, made his mint juleps with French brandy, sold U.S. cottonseed oil with enthusiasm and regularly leafed through Southern history. As for Mamma, nothing cheered her so much as an American visitor. Writes daughter Anne: "She felt herself to be an island around which surged forty million incurious French. . . . When she spoke of herself as a Southerner, these foreigners understood her to mean South America and that was a bad start, so Mamma...