Word: vines
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...Vine Leaves to Harvard Club. Young Cozzens may have been a showoff, but he never really was a rebel, then or later. Says a friend: "No vine leaves in his hair -the Greeks are not in him.'3-Even Cozzens' career as a Harvard ('26) hell-raiser was brief. At Harvard he was part of a splinter intelligentsia-Poet-Instructor Robert Hillyer, Classicist Dudley Fitts et al.-and kept flailing away at a novel that appeared early in his sophomore year. Aptly titled Confusion, it concerned a shimmering young sylph named Cerise D'Atre...
Dunned by his creditors, on probation for cutting classes, living beyond his mother's means (his father had died in 1920), Cozzens got a leave of absence at the end of his sophomore year, and never went back to Harvard's vine leaves. The school rewarded its prodigal son with an honorary Litt. D. degree in 1952 (Cozzens says he accepted it only to please his mother, who died a few months later). Nowadays, on rare trips to New York, he likes to lunch at the Harvard Club, "where everybody acts morose and nobody looks at anybody...
Last week Boris Morros was also on the move. He was back in his beloved show business as a man no longer suspect. Friends who once crossed Hollywood-and-Vine to avoid the man they despised as a flagrant fellow traveler were proud to talk to him again. Boris, who estimates he lost $2,000,000 in possible earnings by becoming a counterspy, was busy with plans for the future. He had already charmed 18 Nobel Prizewinners into recounting their life stories to him, hoped to turn the stories into a series of television films...
However, Giraudoux fails to maintain a balance between ideas and spicy French sex, and the play becomes bikini. Interspersed with rationalistic salvos are a crescendo of kisses, lovers entwined like vine leaves on a Greek frieze and racy gods until the romp is reduced to a gala Gallic gaiety and the comedy verges on hedonism. Frankly, three hours of the bed become boring...
...something like English, but it has a grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of its own. It grows out of a rich compost of dialects heard at Lindy's and the Stork Club, in the hominy-grits-and-corn-pone belt and around Hollywood and Vine. It is calculatedly lowbrow: and out of the mouths of M.C.s, comedians, interviewers, children's hosts, singers and announcers, it has become a powerful influence on American speech. Critic Clifton Fadiman calls it Televenglish...