Word: penniless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...timid new hotel chambermaid is warned to expect trouble from the countess, for Lucrezia Sanziani is dotty, penniless and old-a kind of walking Roman ruin. Fresh from Rome's Trastevere slums, Carmela, the young chambermaid, is prepared to quake at the countess' least whim. Instead, she finds herself cast as a confidante of yesteryear in the old lady's wandering mind. Each day, in the afterglow of the Roman twilight, the countess stares deeply into her Florentine silver-gilt hand mirror and conjures up a hallucinated remembrance of loves past...
Only the Marx Brothers could have produced genuine humor from so superficial and ridiculous a plot. The story, when salvaged from moose heads, flying turkeys, and the like, centers about the attempts of Groucho's penniless producer, to get enough money for food and theatrical costs before he is evicted from his hotel room. "The show must go on" antics provide the entire plot, the rest being elaboration. As a result, the film sometimes drags and the jokes become tedious, but the movie closes with scenes so hilarions that Martin and Lewis seem low-ranking amateurs by comparison...
...impressive criminal record and a reputation for secretiveness. He was born in Denver in 1932, the second child (by her second husband) of Daisie Walker, a politician's daughter from Steamboat Springs, Colo. When Jack was two, his father died, and Daisie was left penniless. She farmed out the boy and his older half-sister, Helen. Jack went to a Denver orphanage. In 1940, when his mother married John Earl King, a prosperous rancher, she gathered her family together again...
...curious that Prince Philip, who just a short time ago was a penniless young man himself, aspiring to marriage with the most eligible young future Queen of Great Britain, should have been such a fire-and-tongs enemy of Townsend, and of Margaret's marriage. It would be interesting to know to just what extent this man is domineering the throne of Britain and the three women that make up the royal family. I am the mother of two, and believe there were strong arguments on both sides of the Margaret-Townsend question, but I'd hate...
...seven, Sophia Augusta Frederica, the penniless daughter of a petty German princeling, found "this idea of a crown . . . running in my head then like a tune, and [it] has been running . . . ever since." The music never stopped. Little Sophia of Stettin became Catherine the Great of Russia, one of the most brilliant women ever to mount a throne. Her Memoirs, published for the first time in an unexpurgated English-language edition, take Catherine only to the threshold of the throne. Nonetheless, her chronicle tells in candid detail how uneasy sleeps the head that even waits for a crown...