Word: ballyhoo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This year's ballyhoo is a far cry from the first Smoker held in the Union by the class of 1914. Speakers, light refreshment, and few "reels of high-class movies" filled the usual agenda, and were followed by the "lusty singing of Harvard songs that often shook the Union's mooseheads...
...small town (area, less than 5 sq. mi.; pop., 30,000) where the great, rich, famous and beautiful stars of Hollywood live and play. Unhappily, NBC showed the customers little Hollywood living and less playing. The principal commodity the community has to offer is glamour, and in its advance ballyhoo NBC shrewdly used the come-on: "Visit the homes of the stars!" But though the camera got to the front lawn, rear garden, perch and doorstep of many a noble mansion, it never quite managed to get inside...
...help ballyhoo a $50-a-plate benefit for Manhattan's nonprofit Actors' Studio. Cinemactor Marlon Brando, a Studio alumnus, and Hollywood Expatriate Marilyn Monroe, presently a Studio "observer," got together to make an unlikely combination that could be a hilarious bonanza at the box office. Features of next month's Studio soiree: legerdemain by Actor Orson Welles, risque-poetry reading by Playwright Tennessee Williams, "after-midnight" songs by Italy's Cinemactress Anna Magnani...
...truth is that now the British crowd is more easily enticed and dominated by mass communications, showmanship, ballyhoo, than the American crowd is. The Americans have had a great deal more of it, and for years were far more responsive to it, but while there is in them still a strain of the gullible and hysterical, there is also the work of a powerful antibody, a strain of the skeptical, the cynical . . . But the newly arrived British bring with them into this world of mass communications, shows and ballyhoo, a certain innocence, belonging to an earlier age . . . Their minds...
Einstein disliked the ballyhoo, but over the years he learned to make use of it. From his pedestal he occasionally poked a finger into worldly affairs. In the '30s he asked the Polish government to pardon draft dodgers. In the '50s he urged "the little minority of intellectuals" to refuse to testify before congressional committees, on the grounds that "it is shameful for a blameless citizen to submit to such an inquisition...