Page 18 With his Gallic charm and chestful of medals, Nungesser proved irresistible to women, and in the spring of 1923 after a whirlwind romance he became engaged to a young New York socialite with the unimprovably glorious name of Consuelo Hatmaker. Miss Hatmaker, who was just nineteen, came from a long line of lively women. Her mother, the former Nellie Sands, was a celebrated beauty who proved too great a handful for three husbands, including Mr. Hatmaker, whom she discarded in a divorce in 1921. This bewildered but well-meaning gentleman opposed his daughter’s marriage to Captain Nungesser on the grounds—not unreasonable on the face of it—that Nungesser was destitute, broken-bodied, something of a bounder, unemployable except in time of war, and French. In
Page 195 though his comments were off the record and all questions had to be submitted in advance to his private secretary, a man with a name that sounded like a W. C. Fields snake-oil salesman: C. Bascom Slemp.
Page 334 Moviegoers around the world suddenly found themselves exposed, often for the first time, to American voices, American vocabulary, American cadence and pronunciation and word order. Spanish conquistadores, Elizabethan courtiers, figures from the Bible were suddenly speaking in American voices—and not just occasionally but in film after film after film. The psychological effect of this, particularly on the young, can hardly be overstated. With American speech came American thoughts, American attitudes, American humor and sensibilities. Peacefully, by accident, and almost unnoticed, America had just taken over the world.
Page 353 That Ruth was locked in a seesaw battle with the youthful upstart Lou Gehrig for the home run championship brought the kind of excitement that made people crush their hats in distraction.
Page 386 He went west as a young man and tried storekeeping, ranching, panning for gold, and working as a railroad policeman, all without success, before he discovered he had a knack for writing stories. In 1912, at the age of thirty-five, he produced his first hit, Tarzan of the Apes.
Page 391 The men squabbled endlessly, and by the early 1920s both Bonis had departed, leaving Liveright (pronounced, incidentally, “live-right,” not “liver-ight”) as sole head. In the three years 1925 to 1927, he produced what was perhaps the most dazzling parade of quality books ever to emerge from a single publishing house in a concentrated period. They included An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, Dark Laughter by Sherwood Anderson, In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (who then eloped to Scribner’s), Soldier’s Pay by William Faulkner, Enough Rope by Dorothy Parker, Crystal Cup by Gertrude Atherton, My Life by Isadora Duncan, Education and the Good Life by Bertrand Russell, Napoleon by Emil Ludwig, The Thibaults by Roger Martin du Gard (forgotten now, but he was soon to win a Nobel Prize), The Golden Day by Lewis Mumford, three plays by Eugene O’Neill, volumes of poems by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robinson Jeffers, and a work of cheery froth by Hollywood screenwriter Anita Loos called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Purporting to be the diary of a dizzy gold digger named Lorelei Lee, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes wasn’t great literature, but it sold and sold and sold. James Joyce was said to be enchanted by it.
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