Word: barbara
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...Eisenhower was radiant. Ike made a brave but futile effort to mask his emotions. A great grin kept spreading over his face, and he was jouncing up & down on his toes as if in time to a gay tune. When John stepped down from the plane with his wife Barbara, he was greeted by a hug and kiss from Mamie, a warm handclasp from his father. Said Ike quickly: "Hello, Son." A newsreel man yelled: "Put your arm around John." Ike balked. "You just go ahead," he replied, a five-star bite in his tone. "You're not directing...
...Barbara, now a young lady of 17, was 11, precocious and down-to-earth when she accompanied Bemelmans on a grand tour of France, Switzerland, the Tyrol, Italy. Every page of their progress is littered with the types that have peopled Poppy's works for the past 15 years. The bowing hotel managers (suggestive of urbane boa constrictors), the bespatted aristocrats, the bored billionaires, the Tyrolean songsters with hooked pipes, the tiny donkeys and the hairy mongrels-all these Bemelmans perennials once floated in a dream ballroom and filled the air with a fragrance of old brandy, Russian leather...
...born in a hotel and brought up in three countries,'' Humorist Ludwig Bemelmans tells his daughter Barbara when she asks why all the characters in his books are crazy. "And then I lived in other hotels . . . and the only people you met were odd ones . . . Upstairs was a collection of Russian grand dukes and French countesses, English lords and American millionaires. Backstairs there were French cooks, Rumanian hairdressers, Chinese manicurists, Italian bootblacks, Swiss managers, English valets . . . When I was sent to America to learn the hotel business here, I ran into the same kind of people...
...speak any language correctly?" asks Barbara...
...where Gourmet Bemelmans used to cook his literary schnitzel only with the finest schmalz, some of Father, Dear Father would make even Charles Dickens clutch his stomach and turn pale (e.g., "I wonder," says Barbara, "if Christ came to earth, could he get a table at Twenty-One?"). Moreover, Poppy's critical eye, which was always whimsically weak, is now rolling toward astigmatism. "It never occurred to me," he groans of Lady Elsie Mendl, ". . . that she, poor darling, was relatively destitute. She left a million . . . but it's peanuts, considering her fashion of living, her travels . . . artisans . . . servants...