Saturday, September 21, 2013

F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Hotel Manager's Smile


The one keeping the hotel staff and the paying customers in line. 

“And a smile—ah, I would get me a smile. I’m still working on that smile. It is to combine the best qualities of a hotel manager, an experienced old social weasel, a head-master on visitors’ day, a colored elevator man, a pansy pulling a profile, a producer getting stuff at half its market value, a trained nurse coming on a new job, a body-vender in her first rotogravure, a hopeful extra swept near the camera, a ballet dancer with an infected toe, and of course the great beam of loving kindness common to all those from Washington to Beverly Hills who must exist by virtue of the contorted pan.” 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1945).

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