I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like

by Mardy Grothe

CECIL BEATON, on Katharine Hepburn

  Getting kicked out of the American Bar Association

  is like getting kicked out of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

  MELVIN BELLI

  This was Belli’s clever way of saying “no big deal” to American Bar Association president Walter Craig, who suggested that Belli’s membership in the ABA might be revoked when Belli made intemperate and unprofessional remarks after his client Jack Ruby was convicted of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald. Belli, the flamboyant “king of torts,” had described the Dallas trial as “the biggest kangaroo-court disgrace in the history of American law.”

  His mind was like a Roquefort cheese,

  so ripe that it was palpably falling to pieces.

  VAN WYCK BROOKS, on Ford Madox Ford

  Ricardo Montalban is to improvisational acting

  what Mount Rushmore is to animation.

  JOHN CASSAVETES

  Why refer to an actor as wooden or stiff when you can say something like this?

  He occasionally stumbled over the truth,

  but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, on Stanley Baldwin

  He is the only bull that brings his own china shop with him.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, on John Foster Dulles

  This is a clever alteration of bull in a china shop, which means being clumsy or reckless in situations that call for grace or delicacy. Churchill used it to describe the performance of U. S. Secretary of State Dulles in the post-World War II years.

  Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams

  is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.

  AARON COPLAND

  Toward the end of her life she looked like a hungry insect

  magnified a million times—a praying mantis that had forgotten how to pray.

  QUENTIN CRISP, on Joan Crawford

  He festooned the dung heap on which he had placed himself with sonnets

  as people grow honeysuckle around outdoor privies.

  QUENTIN CRISP, on Oscar Wilde

  A day away from Tallulah is like a month in the country.

  HOWARD DIETZ, on Tallulah Bankhead

  He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

  GEORGE ELIOT, in Adam Bede (1859)

  This is how the line is usually presented, but the full original passage is even more interesting. As Mr. and Mrs. Irwine discuss Mrs. Poyser, he says: “Her tongue is like a new-set razor. She’s quite original in her talk, too; one of those untaught wits that help to stock a country with proverbs. I told you that capital thing I heard her say about Craig—that he was like a cock, who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow. Now, that’s an Aesop’s fable in a sentence.”

  The Love Machine is a far better book than Valley (of the Dolls)…

  It is still, to be sure, not exactly a literary work.

  But in its own little sub-category…

  it shines, like a rhinestone in a trash can.

  NORA EPHRON, on Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine (1969)

  He looks like the guy in a science-fiction movie

  who is the first to see the Creature.

  DAVID FRYE, on President Gerald Ford

  He’s like a man who sits on a stove

  and then complains that his backside is burning.

  W. S. GILBERT, on partner Arthur Sullivan

  Despite their remarkable creative partnership, Gilbert and Sullivan had a rocky personal relationship. Gilbert made this comment after Sullivan had complained that Gilbert’s skill as a librettist didn’t match his as a composer.

  Bambi with testosterone.

  OWEN GLEIBERMAN, on Prince

  This appeared in Entertainment Weekly in 1990. In 1986, Boy George said of Prince: “He looks like a dwarf who’s been dipped in a bucket of pubic hair.”

  He cast off his friends, as a huntsman his pack,

  For he knew when he pleas’d he could whistle them back.

  OLIVER GOLDSMITH, on David Garrick

  He talks so fast that listening to him is like

  trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.

  BARRY GOLDWATER, on Hubert H. Humphrey

  Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.

  GERMAINE GREER

  This, from Greer’s 1971 The Female Eunuch, is one of the twentieth century’s most sophisticated insults. Feminists long quarreled with Freud, believing that psychoanalysis was a giant edifice built around a male-dominated view of the world. But it wasn’t until this observation that a female voice grasped the concept that the most effective counterattack was not with anger but with wit.

  A very weak-minded fellow I am afraid, and, like the feather pillow,

  bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him.

  EARL DOUGLAS HAIG, on Edward Stanley (Lord Derby)

  His speech was rather like being savaged by a dead sheep.

  DENIS HEALY, on Sir Geoffrey Howe

  Healy said this in a House of Commons debate in 1978. In his 1989 memoir he said the comment “was an adaptation of Churchill’s remark that an attack by Attlee was ‘like being savaged by a pet lamb.’” Nobody else recalls Churchill’s remark (although he once did describe Attlee as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing”).

  If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel,

  I want drilling rights on George Bush’s head.

  JIM HIGHTOWER,

  on George H. W. Bush, in 1988

  That man’s ears make him look like a taxi-cab with both doors open.

  HOWARD HUGHES, on Clark Gable

  He was to ordinary male chauvinist pigs what Moby Dick was to whales.

  ROBERT HUGHES, on Pablo Picasso

  A grenade with the pin pulled.

  JOHN HUSTON, on the volatile Charles Bronson

  The trouble with Senator Long is that he

  is suffering from halitosis of the intellect.

  HAROLD L. ICKES, on Senator Huey P. Long

  Ickes was FDR’s Secretary of the Interior. His best-known quip came in 1939, just after the thirty-seven-year-old Thomas Dewey announced his intention to become the Republican presidential nominee: “Dewey has thrown his diaper into the ring.”

  Calling George Bush shallow is like calling a dwarf short.

  MOLLY IVINS

  Ivins said this about the elder Bush in 1990, but she wouldn’t have quibbled with anyone who applied it to George W. Bush. In 1999, she wrote about him: “If you think his daddy had trouble with ‘the vision thing,’ wait’ll you meet this one.”

  Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts.

  CLIVE JAMES

  As a work of art, it has the same status as

  a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

  CLIVE JAMES, on Judith Krantz’s Princess Daisy (1980)

  The poet of junk food and pop culture.

  SHEILA JOHNSTON, on Steven Spielberg

  The biggest bug in the manure pile.

  ELIA KAZAN,

  on Harry Cohn and Hollywood

  This little flower, this delicate little beauty, this cream puff…

  He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.

  PAUL KEATING, on Australian politician John Hewson

  The Christian Coalition has no more to do with Christianity

  than the Elks Club has to do with large animals with antlers.

  GARRISON KEILLOR

  The Canadian comedian Robin Tyler offered a related analogy: “Fundamentalists are to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.”

  She looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth—

  or anywhere else.

  ELSA LANCHESTER, on Maureen O’Hara

  A cold bitch might be used today, but Lanchester excelled in the art of analogy. If her full meaning is not apparent, or anywhere else suggests frigidity.

  Jimmy Carter as president is lik
e Truman Capote marrying Dolly Parton.

  The job is too big for him.

  RICH LITTLE

  The idea of a job being too big for someone has never been better described. Don Rickles was thinking similarly when he said, “Eddie Fisher married to Elizabeth Taylor is like me trying to wash the Empire State Building with a bar of soap.”

  He looks just like the little man on the wedding cake.

  ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH, on Thomas E. Dewey

  Mrs. Longworth, the colorful daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, became such a fixture in our nation’s capital in the mid-1900s that she was called “Wash-ington’s other monument.” She made this remark during the 1948 presidential race, when Dewey was heavily favored to defeat Harry S Truman. Once the remark was made, many voters couldn’t get the image out of their minds—Dewey, with his pencil-thin mustache and formal demeanor, did look as stiff as the groom figures seen on wedding cakes. How many votes did it cost Dewey? Enough to give Truman the surprise victory, which he celebrated by hoisting a Chicago Tribune with the famously wrong headline: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.

  Though I yield to no one in my admiration for Mr. Coolidge,

  I do wish he did not look as if he had been weaned on a pickle.

  ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH, on Calvin Coolidge

  Mrs. L. heard this remark from her doctor, and even though she went to great lengths to credit him, the saying is almost always attributed to her.

  His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich.

  It enabled him to run, though not to soar.

  THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, on John Dryden

  Macaulay added: “When he attempted the highest flights, he became ridiculous; but while he remained on a lower region, he outstripped all competitors.”

  You know, the French remind me a little bit

  of an aging actress of the 1940s who was still trying

  to dine out on her looks but doesn’t have the face for it.

  JOHN MCCAIN

  When France failed to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq, many American politicians fired rhetorical shots at our former ally. Another insulting analogy came from Jed Babbin, a former deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration. Appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball in January 2003, he said, “You know, frankly, going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless noisy baggage behind.”

  She is closer to organized prostitution than anything else.

  MORRISSEY, on Madonna

  A pile of shit in a silk stocking.

  NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, on Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand

  The triumph of sugar over diabetes.

  GEORGE JEAN NATHAN, on James M. Barrie

  The Englishman has all the qualities of a poker except its occasional warmth.

  DANIEL O’CONNELL

  The lighthouse in a sea of absurdity.

  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, on Victor Hugo

  The air currents of the world never ventilated his mind.

  WALTER H. PAGE, on Woodrow Wilson

  Page, an early Wilson supporter, was rewarded with an appointment as ambassador to Great Britain in 1913. He became disenchanted with Wilson’s policy of neutrality in the early years of World War I. While he was pleased when the United States entered the war in 1917, he never again supported Wilson. The line perfectly describes many contemporary Americans who have taken love of country a little too far. They fold up the American flag and wrap it around their eyes like a blindfold, making them virtually immune to international influence.

  A vacuum with nipples.

  OTTO PREMINGER, on Marilyn Monroe

  Also speaking about Monroe, Billy Wilder said: “The question is whether Marilyn is a person at all or one of the greatest Dupont products ever invented. She has breasts like granite and a brain like Swiss cheese, full of holes.”

  He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt.

  He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.

  JOHN RANDOLPH, on Edward Livingston

  Many books and Web sites continue to mistakenly report that Henry Clay was the target of this legendary metaphorical insult. John F. Kennedy even got it wrong in his 1957 book Profiles in Courage (where he described the line as “the most memorable and malignant sentence in the history of personal abuse”). Randolph, who was hailed by William Safire as the recognized “master of American political invective,” said it about Edward Livingston, a former New York City mayor who had been elected to Congress. In 1998, Bill Weld, the ex-federal prosecutor and former governor of Massachusetts, titled his first novel Mackerel by Moonlight. Appropriately, it was a tale of political corruption.

  He is to acting what Liberace was to pumping iron.

  REX REED, on Sylvester Stallone

  Most of the time, Brando sounds like he has a mouth full of wet toilet paper.

  REX REED, on Marlon Brando

  If a swamp alligator could talk, it would sound like Tennessee Williams.

  REX REED

  I was particularly stunned by the casting of Cruise, who is no more

  my Vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler.

  ANNE RICE, on Tom Cruise

  Rice said this in 1993, shortly after the announcement that Cruise would play the Vampire Lestat in a film adaptation of her 1974 novel, Interview With a Vampire. After screening the film a year later, Rice was so captivated by Cruise’s performance that she recanted her position in a full-page ad she took out in the trade newspaper Variety. In a later interview, she replaced her insulting analogy with a complimentary one: “I like to believe Tom’s Lestat will be remembered the way Olivier’s Hamlet is remembered.”

  Poor George, he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.

  ANN RICHARDS, on George H. W. Bush

  In 1988, three years before becoming Texas governor, Richards delivered this line in an address at the Democratic National Convention. The remark, an alteration of the metaphor about being born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth, was a two-fisted jab—referring to Bush’s elocution difficulties as well as his privileged background. On this latter point, Democrats in Texas were fond of saying about Bush: “He was born on third base and thought he got there by hitting a triple.”

  Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails,

  with here and there an also dropped hammer.

  JOHN RUSKIN

  Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks.

  ERIC SEVAREID

  Miss Streisand looks like a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat

  surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun.

  JOHN SIMON, on Barbra Streisand

  Miss Garland’s figure resembles

  the giant-economy-size tube of toothpaste in girls’ bathrooms:

  squeezed intemperately at all points, it acquires a shape

  that defies definition by the most resourceful solid geometrician.

  JOHN SIMON, on Judy Garland

  Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum

  with insufficient flying buttresses.

  JOHN SIMON, on Rigg’s nude scene in Abelard and Heloise

  Rigg is best-known for playing Mrs. Peel in the 1960s TV series The Avengers. Simon’s remark became popular in part because of its similarity to a simile American men have long used to describe buxom women: built like a brick shithouse.

  He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop.

  SYDNEY SMITH, on Thomas Babington Macaulay

  Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan—a Mount Rushmore of incompetence.

  DAVID STEINBERG

  His mind was like a soup dish, wide and shallow;

  it could hold a small amount of nearly anything,

  but the slightest jarring spilled the soup into somebody’s lap.

  IRVING STONE, on William Jennings Bryan

  Reading him is like wading through glue.
/>   ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, on Ben Jonson

  A louse in the locks of literature.

  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, on critic Churton Collins

  The bosom friend of senators and congressmen

  was about as daring as an early Shirley Temple movie.

  JAMES THURBER, on Will Rogers

  A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg

  that looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.

  MARK TWAIN, on an unidentified cruise ship passenger

  Twain wrote this about a passenger who, in the middle of an 1867 Atlantic Ocean crossing, asked the captain if the ship was going to come to a halt on Sundays.

  His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket,

  and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere.

  MARK TWAIN, on Charles L. Webster

  Twain formed his own publishing company in 1885 and appointed Charles L. Webster, his nephew by marriage, as president. Twain never had much respect for Webster and forced him out of the company three years later. The complete passage in which I found this observation is a metaphorical tour de force. It may even have stimulated the popular expression about engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed person. The full passage can be found at: www.metaphoramor.com.

  Donald Trump’s hair is to coiffure what Ashton Kutcher is to dramatic acting.

  TONY VITALE

  Froth at the top, dregs at bottom, but the middle excellent.

  VOLTAIRE, describing the English nation

  Audrey Hepburn is the patron saint of anorexics.

  ORSON WELLES

  The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one

  conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny arf—the sound of a lap dog.

  GEORGE F. WILL, on George W. Bush

  Former president George H. W. Bush was also the recipient of an insulting dog analogy. In the late 1980s, Mike Royko wrote, “He has the look about him of someone who might sit up and yip for a Dog Yummie.”

  Little Truman had a voice so high it could only be detected by a bat.

  TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, on Truman Capote