Word: prima
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...swankest of the arts in 18th-Century London was Italian opera. Periwigged courtiers, who could not understand a word of it, raised their lace cuffs to applaud the ornate trilling of swivel-voiced prima donnas. Fashionable composers like Handel had to write their librettos in Italian. The Caruso of the period was the Italian eunuch-Francesco Bernardi Senesino, whose misfortunate voice earned fabulous sums at London's Royal Academy of Music. Lustier London wits like Henry Fielding began poking fun at this artificial art, inveighed against London's "wanton, affected fondness for foreign musick," with its "squeaking recitatives...
...Richard Knight had a $200,000 bank account, was earning more than $80,000 a year. He specialized in sensational divorce cases. Not yet 30, Lawyer Knight lived in a suite at the St. Regis. He drove a Cadillac, had spent a week on the Riviera with a celebrated prima donna, boasted that he called Mrs. Vincent Astor by her first name...
...whole, it's a well balanced outfit with several promising prospects that looks as if it may develop into a team and not just a practice ground for future prima donnas...
...studio feud. This device worked well recently for Warners', when George Raft and James Cagney were inaccurately rumored to be at each others throats while making Each Dawn I Die, and similar apocryphal stories were circulated about Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins during production of The Old Maid. Prima Donna Shearer, for purely professional reasons, saw to it that she was billed above rival Prima Donna Crawford, stipulated that her name should be advertised in type half as large as the title and twice as large as that of Lesser Luminary Russell. But if this precaution stirred...
...Tarbell telling me that I'm to cover the war." In a few minutes the phone did ring and Managing Editor David Tarbell told surprised Jock Bellairs that he was to cover the war. Correspondent Bellairs scooped Richard Harding Davis and many another prima donna on the attack on the U. S. torpedo-boat Winslow, returned to St. Louis a newspaperman's hero, went back to covering police. Around him have been woven some of the best-known newspaper apocrypha of that newspaperman's town. Samples...