People: People, Aug. 8, 1949

George Bernard Shaw, pixie, playwright and pundit, turned 93, ate some birthday cake and let go a thought or two on politics (“Stalin [is] the mainstay of peace in Europe”) and his own advanced years (“Thank God, I’ve reached my second childhood”). London’s Liberal News Chronicle concurred only in the latter view. “[Shaw],” it wrote, “is now the grand old man of English letters but not, alas … of English politics. In that field he has said wittily a greater number of silly things than any intelligent man is entitled to say in … a lifetime.”

Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, potent Roman Catholic orator who has struck many a telling blow in the spiritual battle of East & West, showed little respect for his chief ideological foe. “Stalin,” said Sheen, “is possibly the most stupid politician in the history of the world.”

Retired Admiral William F. (“Bull”) Halsey, once something of a menace in Pacific waters himself, showed even less respect for his colleague, the atom bomb. “I don’t think the people on the East Coast . . . quite realize what went on in the Pacific,” the Bull told a reunion dinner of the Greenwich, Conn. “Old Twelfth” Artillery. “I don’t think we had more than 500,000 or 750,000 men [out there, but] with those 750,000 we contained somewhere between two and three million Japanese, and notwithstanding the dropping of the atomic bomb—and that was a great mistake—we defeated the Japanese nation . . .”

Afterthoughts

After searching high & low these many years, Illustrator George Petty at last found in Screen Star Joan Caulfield (height, 5 ft. 5 in.; weight, 119 lbs.; waist, 25 in.; bust, 35½ in.) the perfect model for his once-famed Petty Girl, promptly set to work sketching her. By an astounding coincidence, Joan was hard at work on a new movie—The Petty Girl.

Lusty Poet Robert Burns stood posthumously revealed as a pillar of unexpected propriety.” In a holograph letter sold at a London auction last week, Bobby told an author friend that he had once lent a sailor a copy of his book. The book, said the poet, had so affected the sailor that instead of seducing a girl friend, he had married her.

Vice President Alben W. Berkley bussed a Virginia beauty, crowned her queen of the Culpeper bicentennial festival and cracked: “While I’m in the mood, I may crown one of my own some of these days and keep her.” The quip, 71-year-old Widower Barkley hastily explained to reporters overeager for the sound of wedding bells, had nothing whatever to do with Mrs. Carleton Hadley, the comely widow whom he had just visited in St. Louis.

“Shoemaker, stick to your last!” was the sound advice dealt out to his fellow craftsmen by hardworking, he-man Author Ernest Hemingway in the afternoon of a full life. “If a writer,” wrote Ernest in the New York Times Book Review, “became a critic or entered other fields it could lead to grave humiliations . . . Think of how it could shake a writer’s confidence to lose the Secretariat of Agriculture to Louis Bromfield in some little smoke-filled room, or wake some morning to find that it was André Malraux who was managing De Gaulle instead of you, or that Jean-Paul Sartre had won the hand of Simone de Beauvoir while you had been left at the post in the Fifth at Aqueduct. No, I think it is better just to write.”

John Foster Dulles, freshman Senator from New York, who was denied a seat on the potent Foreign Relations Committee because of seniority, brought his formidable knowledge of world affairs to bear in a consolation post—the District of Columbia Committee, which runs the city of Washington. “I am generally,” said Dulles, “in favor of killing off the starlings. They are an importation from Europe that is not good.”

Down Beats

Margaret Truman laid aside her pitch pipes and throat sprays to spend a “restful weekend” in Newport, R.I. with Madame Minister Perle Mesta, attended an American Legion carnival and rode the Ferris wheel with her hostess.

San Francisco’s famed, roly-poly Conductor Pierre Monteux braved the 95° heat of New York City’s Lewisohn Stadium (“The weather—eet ees brutal”), to lead the Philharmonic Symphony for a week. Gushed effusive Concert Chairman Mrs. Charles S. (“Minnie”) Guggenheimer of Monteux’s reading of Beethoven’s Fifth: “Simply magnificent! It wasn’t at all like Beethoven!” The directors of Chicago’s Ravinia Music Festival advertised a smooth combo to perform some trios by Schubert, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. The lineup: Jascha Heifetz, Artur Rubinstein, Gregor Piatigorsky. Northwestern University promised to lend its applause by conferring honorary degrees on all three.

Byways

No one could tell Moscow that U.S.

Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas, vacationing in Persia with his son, was merely enjoying an innocent holiday. The Justice, said a Russian broadcast to Persia, was in reality “an arrogant speculator” who, with “a dozen devils . . . that is, U.S. Army officers in mountaineering outfits,” was climbing Persia’s mountains to spy on the Soviet border.

Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. was househunting around Dutchess County, N.Y. for himself and bride-to-be Suzanne Perrin, a New York socialite and exMarine. Franklin Jr.’s new marriage will raise the wedlock score to ten for the five children of the late President (see MILESTONES).

Near Everett, Wash., state highway police sent out a hurry call for local cops to help stop a black limousine hurtling along well over the speed limit, then called them off in a hurry when they found the car belonged to Washington Governor Arthur B. Langlie.

Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray and North Carolina’s Senator Frank Graham, Washington-bound in an Air Force C-47, hastily donned parachutes when a crew member mistook a broken rubber de-icer waving in the plane’s slipstream for a fire. The Chief Justice, said Secretary Gray, “remained calm.”

In Egypt to talk over dollar troubles with local officials, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder took time out to look at the situation from a true Egyptian perspective.

The Ago Khan, still lively at 71, dropped down from Evian to his villa at Cannet to offer potluck (ham, langouste, chicken, ice cream and 1928 champagne) to a few friends. Among those present: Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Archduke Otto of Habsburg, Princess Niloufer of Hyderabad, the Nawab of Palanpur, Marchioness of Milford Haven, Count and Countess Crespi, Norma Shearer, Clifton Webb, Darryl Zanuck and wife, Pamela Churchill and Errol Flynn.