The Frontiers of Effrontery IN his slipshod way Mr. Kennedy
has indeed a tale to tell. He was in a coffee-bar 'in the heart of Lon- don's Soho quarter'—American papers please COPY—when young Hicks shouldered his way through the crowd, struck a chord on his guitar and began to sing. 'It was his extraordinary per- sonality that was causing girls standing around me to • . . bite unknowingly at their lingers.' That Yery night Mr. Kennedy latched on and the rest Is history : the Stork Club, a music-hall tour, two triumphant weeks at the Café de Paris, two films, Copenhagen, a Command Performance, South Africa. Mr. Kennedy receives a pair of driving- gloves from his Trilby : 'it was a typical Tommy gesture and it meant so much to know that he had not forgotten those early, pioneering days.' Theyhad been in show business a year.
With the ingenuous fervour of a missionary disclosing how he bought the heathen with beads, Mr. Kennedy lists the lies he told in his selling campaign and is appropriately righteous when
a missionary of another denomination does his Tommy down. The most terrifying thing about his
Short book is its bland cdnfidence that two and two need no longer make four, that people have grown too apathetic to add. He is the conjuror who
Shows you how the trick is done and then fools
You with it again. On the last page he protests about 'the growing tendency in some newspapers today to write only "knocking" stories about stars
as big as Tommy.' But, as he well knows, almost any publicity is good publicity : you can knock
around the clock and the moon-faced masses will
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