Word: shyness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...reserved to the point of shyness. With strangers he is wary and reticent. With men he knows, he is warm and voluble. But he is still more voluble on the platform: two-hour speeches from him are not rare. His addresses are clear, often viciously ironic, but never so polished as the oratory of Roosevelt or Churchill. Some of the speeches he delivered in 1939-41 Molotov would probably just as soon forget...
...London, as a full director, MacDonald made the documentary Men of the Lightship, turned out a dozen or so successful and forgettable potboilers, filmed the blitz fires of London from the dome of St. Paul's. His shyness once drew from King Vidor an indirect compliment: "That guy would have been a top Hollywood director but he just didn't know how to blow his own horn." Said MacDonald last fortnight, to a preview group of film and pressmen: "These combat scenes can be done in Hollywood and you can do them very nicely, without loss of life...
Bill Gentry, major dome of swimming managers (all of whom wear white ducks, shirts, sneakers--fashion note) has an added duty common to only a few of his clan. At every home meet, Bill is the MC, and his customary shyness must be disspelled for the moment as he announces to an adoring throng that Geoligan won the 50 yard dog paddle in exactly six seconds flat. For the Eastern intercollegiates last weekend, Gentry added a dapper white jacket to his costime. It had that certain touch...
Daredeviltry and Research. Eddie Allen, 47, looked like no Hollywood conception of a test pilot. He was modest to the point of shyness. Frail as a column of smoke, he never weighed more than 135. The few straggly strands of hair on top of his bald pate made him look like a tweedy cupid. His nose was fused into his face when he spun to earth more than 20 years ago in young Fred Harvey's white Curtiss Jenny, but many years later a plastic surgeon built him a creditable nose...
...eyes light up behind his pince-nez when he shakes a stranger's hand. But his shyness is so painful that he can never relax. Only a few men like Franklin Roosevelt have known the human warmth that lies behind Morgenthau's deaconish mien. Most others have decided, after a time, that he is suspicious, autocratic, a real cold fish...