Word: wastrel
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...this audaciously frank autobiography, the most glamorous figure since Lord Byron shares with us his confessions and his memories. ... Strange wastrel days ... flashes of long-gone frolics ... These astounding confessions bid fair to become the sensation of the literary year," said a Ladies' Home Journal advertisement in October, 1925. The article, thus heralded, appeared: it was neither rowdy nor pornographic. It was the well-mannered and suave memoirs of John Barrymore. Titillatable females who had been led to expect red-hot nights increased the circulation of the Ladies' Home Journal and were undoubtedly disappointed...
...actions by which an individual emerges from a type. The degeneracy of Daniel Pardway's issue-Gene into "a lout among gentleman, a gentleman among louts;" Bert into a floorwalker and window-dresser; Phoebe into a dreamy sadist, via sex-starvation; Freddie into a Princeton fop, proud wastrel and frayed dope fiend-seems mechanical, arbitrary. Like their father, the reader sees little of these children until it is time for them to appear in bars and brothels. Their Presbyterian mother dies young and their worldy-wise Kentucky step-mother is taken up and pushed aside as brusquely by Author...
...Half a century later one Henri Stephan de Blowitz, jack of all trades, paunchy ne'er-do-well, sought the Paris office of the famed London Times and audaciously asked for a job, although he admitted that he had never written a line of news in all his wastrel life...
...Strange wastrel days. . . . tragic, cruel days when he struggled with a life that was bitter...
...wastrel hookers did more than they were paid for. Having hooked a feather into the tail of a famed French lawyer, one of them capered at his side, shouting: "Ya been in a henhouse, ya been in a hen-house." The barrister, embarrassed perhaps by a guilty conscience, pretended to share their mirth...