Word: soir
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Staffers on France-Soir, the brightest, brassiest and widest-read daily in Paris, are used to the boss's violent temper tantrums. It is a dull day in the grimy, ill-lit building near the Place de la Bourse when only four or five storms blow out of the tiny office where tiny (5 ft. 2 in.) Editor in Chief Pierre Lazareff sits, guarded by two doormen and five secretaries...
...Model. Lazareff and a talented young (26) Resistance leader named Aristide Blank had moved in on Paris with the puny staff of the underground Défense de la France. They renamed it France-Soir, packed it with straight news for Parisians who got almost everything but news in most of the French press. France-Soir pushed swiftly to France's top circulation (about 600,000 daily). U.S. newsmen credit its success to shrewd application of tried-&-true U.S. tricks: big, crisp headlines, heavy accent on crime, bright feature stories and splashy makeup. Although he dashes off headlines with...
...France-Soir is not the only place where Lazareff dips an end-chewed pen. His France-Dimanche, a sexy-sensational weekly, hits 400,000 circulation. He has a weekly sports Record, (circ. 180,000), something for the kiddies called France Soir-Jeudi, a slick monthly, Réalités, which he calls "a very modest FORTUNE," and a syndicate called Scoop, which sells France-Soir's features to the hinterland. His wife, Héléne Gordon Lazareff, who trained on the New York Times and Harper's Bazaar, now edits Elle, a Parisian women...
...Paris-Midi, he livened its feature page so capably that at 19 he became its city editor. He needled the news with sensationalism but did not twist it politically, as most prewar French papers did. In a year its circulation multiplied twelve times. Then Lazareff took on Paris-Soir, in a few years ran it to France's biggest daily (circ. 2,500,000). He put the formula to work on a picture magazine, and Match surged to 1,200,000 circulation. His Marie-Claire, for women, hit 1,000,000. Lazareff left Paris when the Germans arrived...
Examples of the lulling school: Tchaikovsky's None But the Lonely Heart, Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, and "scores of feeble organ pieces called Dreams, Harmonies du Soir, Berceuse, or Forest Vespers." As for sexiness, Gounod is perhaps the worst offender: "Voluptuousness . . . was in Gounod's nature; he could not escape it. In opera it is fine; in the church it has no place. Listen to The Redemption ... or to the Seven Last Words of Gounod's spiritual disciple, Dubois! The suave melodies are the same, the suggestive rhythms are the same, the osculatory orchestration...