Laughter and hail-fellow dialogue booming; a short corridor lined with dressing rooms.

It slowly becomes clear that Ryan, beneath his bluff, hail-fellow exterior, is quite unstable.

"Behind the genial, hail-fellow persona, we discovered, lay unsuspected ambitions and discontents.

Time also noted that Chappuis was unlike his predecessor, the "hail-fellow" Tom Harmon.

After all, he shares Mr. Reagan's Western style, tax-cutting zeal and hail-fellow personality.

The surface rhythm is all hail-fellow jauntiness, echoing Kipling and the music hall, beneath which lie deep fissures of unease.

But some critics say that despite Mr. Ebbers's hail-fellow demeanor, he is not always welcoming to top managers from the companies he acquires.

Instead of rising from the chess table in the hail-fellow fashion that Leon cultivated, Noel gestured in tired fashion, inviting his brother to sit down.

It was distressing, because he was coming to like her-like her a great deal, more so even than the usual hail-fellow good comradeship that was the norm among Heralds.

Mr. McCarthy, a nonstop ad-libbing, hail-fellow international sports impresario, previously used his longtime connections to the Boston Celtics to help introduce professional basketball to China.

Herakleides had an offhand hail-fellow way, which was part both of himself and of his politics; he made it a touchstone of good will to be met on his own terms.

"In all the flesh-pressing and simulated hail-fellow horse flop of the campaign," Mr. Klein writes, "he'd begun to worry that he was losing track of the basic grammar of human interaction.

Mr. Zagat ("I always say zuh-GAT, but everyone else says ZAG-it," he said), 54, is a large and loquacious man with a hail-fellow manner and a rumbly voice.

Kyle MacLachlan is all hail-fellow shallowness as Claudius, the murderous corporate usurper; Diane Venora makes a finely distraught and dangerous Gertrude; and Bill Murray lends Polonius a ravaged dignity.

Six-foot-four and burly (he's currently on a Jenny Craig diet), with long limbs and square-jawed ruggedness, Mr. Morris should be a towering (and menacing) presence as Iago despite his hail-fellow facade.

Inside the club's tiny, bomb-shelterlike office, Mr. Barrett, a former police officer and antiques dealer who plays the hail-fellow Jack Dempsey role at the club, was regaling several friends with his rendition of "Danny Boy."

For Carpenter's hail-fellow ebullience, his natural reserve and reticence were the perfect foil: over against his friend's near-idolatry of all things naval stood his own thorough-going detestation of all that the Kapok Kid so warmly admired.

But here he is, attracting hail-fellow backslaps and waves in a restaurant a block from the White House, a man restored to his combative element as he eagerly maps out the First Lady's approach to a Senate run in New York.

He had a persuasive, hail-fellow well-met air with him which appealed to customers of this sort, and they said to one another: "What's the good of throwing money away when you can get a coat and skirt at Lynn's that nobody knows don't come from Paris?"

They walked through the milling ruck and inside to make their purchases with an air of uncomfortable patronization and hail-fellow that left a curdled amusement in Richards's mouth.

He's an amiable hail-fellow in the preppy mode who looks as if he could be Kevin Costner's older brother but who grew up in a blue-collar suburb south of Boston and entered Harvard against the wishes of the nuns at his Catholic high school.