Dwight Garner, on Sam Irvin’s biography of Eloïse creator Kay Thompson:

The tra-la-la is woven into the voice that Mr. Irvin, a veteran film and television director and producer, has concocted for his book, a voice that seems to have been stolen from the trade magazine Daily Variety about 1947. In “Kay Thompson” people don’t leave jobs, they’re seen “ankling” them. They’re not fired, they’re “eighty-sixed.” They’re not tricked but “bamboozled.”

A lover is a “boudoir companion”; the record industry is the “platter biz”; piano playing is “tinkling ivories”; clubs are “niteries”; executives are either “grand poo-bahs” or “muckety-mucks.” Oh, mama. As the gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker is told in “The Sweet Smell of Success,” “You’ve got more twists than a barrel of pretzels.” Reading “Kay Thompson” is like running a cheese grater across your central nervous system.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, November 12th, 2010 at 10:30 am.