Word: spendthrift
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...like any other shopping street in the fertile crescent of Beverly Hills. The buildings tend to be one-and two-story structures, pastel, neo-Spanish, neo-20th Century-Fox. Even the ficus trees lining the street seem to be part of a grand design by Potemkin. Still, the veteran spendthrift arriving on Rodeo Drive has a sense of déjà vu. No, the street does not possess the discreet elegance of Paris' Rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré, the stylishness of Rome's Via Condotti or the hustling excitement of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. But the very rich find most...
...price McHale pays for all this spectacle is credibility. Not for a nanosecond do Aldrich and enemies seem any thing more than what they are: the extravagant inventions of a spendthrift imagination. Sometimes McHale gives away too much. Sentences often peter out in persiflage: "At the corner of Tremont Street the detective chased off a gaggle of four queens with identical gold earrings who did an impromptu high-kick routine to a rhythm of contemptuous offerings aimed at the crowd of well-dressed and generally middle-aged couples descending the steps of the Shubert Theatre after the last performance...
There were old railroad money and new fast-food money, Saudi sheiks and Japanese transistor magnates, Texas oilmen and British noblemen, not to mention the usual clutch of Whitneys and Vanderbilts. Around the barns of the great breeding farms-Spendthrift, Claiborne and the like-and under the canopies covering the caviar at auction-weekend parties, the talk was peppered with the names of sires: What A Pleasure, Round Table, Sir Ivor, Northern Dancer. A casual comment about one filly brought the quick question: "How was she bred, ma'am?" The equally quick answer: "By Secretariat out of Crimson Saint...
...only one. McLaughlin takes Ralph to task for apathy and irresponsibility, saying "He hasn't proposed one thing to help Middlesex County--not an idea in almost two years." Danehy attacks him for never having filed a bill in the legislature. They both call him a spendthrift and blame him for Somerville's skyrocketing property tax, which has risen from $199.70 per $1000 to $237.60 in the last year. McLaughlin says that in the two years before becoming a commissioner, he watched Ralph drive the county budget up 25 percent. During his two-year tenure, McLaughlin credits himself and Danehy...
...costly Middlesex County Training School, an institution for truant youths. Ralph says that McLaughlin's budget claims are "at very best a half truth" because the influx of federal revenue sharing funds in recent years has altered the county budget without any help from the commissioners. He resents the spendthrift tag. While county assessments have climbed 97 percent in the four years before his election, they have risen just 5 per cent in the four years since...