Word: ouida
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Mention of the word party brings to Ouida Bergère's baby brown eyes a weird, predaceous glitter. Ouida Bergère (nee Ida Berger) is chubby, red-headed Mrs. Basil Rathbone. Once something of a scriptress, for seven years she was head of Paramount's scenario department. Now, with her tall, dark, talented, professionally sinister, personally amiable cinemactor husband she inhabits an overstuffed stronghold in Hollywood's fashionable Bel Air quarter. There she contrives her parties. They are said to begin as a fulmination of her blood, a bounding along the veins, which eventually detonates...
...late a run of foul California weather has dashed Ouida Rathbone's efforts. It began with her Charity Ball last December. The project was sumptuous. Pièce de résistance was to have been an Alpine scene re-created with real snow in the subtropical palm gardens of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Afternoon of the party the rains came. What with this disappointment and that, by 7 in the evening Mrs. Rathbone was in a state of nervous collapse and could not take part in the festivities. But her guests had a high old time inside...
Johnnie, a U. S. aeronautical expert who in typical Arlen fashion is also the Comte de Saint-Cloud, tells a tale of high adventure in a style which intermittently suggests Ouida, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, E. Phillips Oppenheim and P. G. Wodehouse. Between fashionable adulteries unrolls the story of Johnnie's employer, Chance Winter, an Englishman with world-wide armament connections which he uses to promote the subversive ends of an international secret organization. Suave and ruthless, Winter eventually meets an appropriate fate...
...Thin, worried, cautious, lazy, stubborn, plaintive, he ate little meat, drank no liquor and, even as a wealthy man, grew vegetables for his own table, selling the surplus. When he planned a quiet cottage on Nob Hill, his fun-loving wife, who greatly admired the romantic novels of Ouida, took over the planning of it, turned it into a huge mass of towers, gables, and steeples, with a dining room to seat 60 guests, a bedroom inlaid with ivory, ebony and semiprecious stones. Hopkins died before it was finished. Leaning on his hoe, he used to stare at it skeptically...
Under Two Flags (Twentieth Century-Fox). This great-aunt of all Foreign Legion stories was written in 1867 by Louise de la Ramee (Ouida), performed on the U. S. stage by Blanche Bates, in the silent cinema by Theda Bara (1916) and Priscilla Dean (1922). The current version, costly, handsome and overlong, offers a concession to modernity: Gregory Ratoff, as a Legionnaire, says with a thick Yiddish accent: "We're all supposed to be trying to forget something, but there's so much noise around here I can't remember what it is I'm supposed...