Word: stiff-collared
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...family's fortune (and of the New York Central Railroad), was a whiskey-swilling, street-fighting parvenu who bullied his wife and children, cheated the public and gave away pittances from the $100 million he amassed. Auchincloss notes, a bit sorrowfully, that Vanderbilt and his colleagues in stiff-collar crime like Jay Gould would not find themselves out of place on Drexel Burnham Lambert's Wall Street. Still, the author can find it in his heart to suggest that the commodore's coarseness may have been caused by social insecurity...
Smith's new book, a clothesline strung from his best-selling Low Man on a Totem Pole, ought at least keep its author paying stiff-collar taxes. Like Totem Pole it consists of the sort of talk that might be had, by the hour, from any boozy, bawdy, abundant newspaperman. Such talk is dull in spots, complacently boorish in others, childish in some of its conclusions (Westbrook Pegler, though mentally "the human saddle sore" is as a prose stylist "one of the great writers of our day"). At its worst the book has at least the charm...
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