Mary McCarthy had a famous smile, but it didn’t help her much.
Usually a smile is a sign of friendliness, attraction, general
sociability. But not Mary’s. Her smile was known to be a trap and a
weapon, a “long, white upper blade of handsome, emphatic teeth,” as one
reporter put it in Esquire. “She can smoke through it, argue
through it, spill the beans through it, even smile through it.” You
couldn’t trust it. You couldn’t trust her.
The Mary of the switchblade smile is the one we remember. Her legacy
has been her scandals: the libel suit after calling Lillian Hellman a
liar, her frank writing about sex, her habit of putting her friends in
her novels, her leave-nothing-out memoirs. She was a “cold and beautiful
novelist who devoured three husbands and a crowd of lovers in the
course of a neatly managed career,” according to Simone de Beauvoir, who
should know, one supposes. ... [mehr] https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/course-they-hated-her
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