People: People, Feb. 21, 1949

Mae West, who has not denied being 56, was still having trouble trying to settle down. “I’m still looking for the right man,” she confided to the New York Post’s Columnist Earl Wilson. “My trouble is, I find so many right ones, it’s hard to decide.”

The Most Rev. Geoffrey F. Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, 61, father of six, conceded that large families had “problems” nowadays—but he was still in favor of them. “I find it very difficult to attach the word ‘family’ to a family of one. It is not easy to attach it to a family of two; but I begin to feel happier when it is a family of three.”

Publisher Bennett Cerf, columnist and joke-anthologist, bemoaned the creative life: “It’s a good thing for a publisher to turn author once in a while. He learns how easy it is to feel hurt. On publication day he looks at the papers and finds his book mentioned only among Books Published Today . . . Even his friends don’t know what day this is. Life outside is actually going on as usual. It is very hard to take.”

British-born Gertrude Lawrence, a hit in London in September Tide, was deeply touched at her welcome home, and wanted all her U.S. friends to know about it. Said she in a note to Variety: “Such loving devotion after so long an absence is most moving. After all, these people have experienced great suffering, privation, and tragedy together during the twelve years I have been away . . .”

Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre speculated on the wonderful possibilities of movies: “Sherwood Anderson once called himself a liar. That was his way of saying that he was a writer, and his lies have charmed us ever since his writings began to appear . . . But he lied with words only. What tempts today’s writer for the screen is that he can lie with cinematic imagery.”

Moviemaker Sam Goldwyn welcomed television with some rolling prose for the New York Times Magazine: “The future of motion pictures, conditioned as it will be by the competition of television, is going to have no room for the deadwood of the present or the faded glories of the past.” And a good thing, too, thought Goldwyn: “It will take brains instead of just money to make pictures.”

In Iowa City, Pollsters George Gallup and Archibald Crossley dutifully showed up for a three-day forum on poll-taking (Elmo Roper was invited too, but took sick and couldn’t make it). Gallup insisted that he enjoyed living dangerously but “I’ll never be happy until we’ve got this thing licked.” Crossley concurred: “We are not here to praise the polls, but certainly not to bury them.”

Fame & Fortune

In Usti-nad-labem, Czechoslovakia, tactful city fathers changed the name of General Eisenhower Embankment to Premier Antonin Zapotocky Embankment, and the name of Marshal Tito Street to Jan Sverma Street (after a late national Communist hero).

Prince Philip, 27, hailed by the London Master Tailors’ Benevolent Association as the “perfect example of how a Briton should be dressed on all occasions,” graciously accepted the honor: “I am one of the generation that started the war in nappies [diapers], spent the next eight years in uniform, and, when peace broke out, found myself without any clothes.”

Countess Felicia Gizycka, high-strung only daughter of the Washington Times-Herald’s late, high-strung Eleanor Medill (“Cissy”) Patterson, quietly settled out of court for $400,000 (instead of the $25,000 annual income left her from Cissy’s $16 million estate). Felicia, who had tried to break the will because Cissy was not “of sound mind and memory” when she signed it, said that she was happy about “a settlement . . . without bitterness and consequent loss to everyone . . .”

Droopy-eyed Cinemactor Robert Mitchum, convicted of conspiracy to possess marijuana, drew 60 days in jail plus two years probation. Bob’s part owner, Producer David O. Selznick, said optimistically that his star would “come out of his trouble a finer man.” Meanwhile, photographers snapped dramatic shots of the film hero posed against the bars of the Los Angeles county jail.

Eugene O’Neill, who ranked No. 3 on a similar poll in 1936, edged out Sinclair Lewis (previously No. 1) as the American author most likely to achieve immortality. A poll of readers of The New Colophon, a book collectors’ quarterly, also listed in the order of finish: Robert Frost (No. 5 in 1936); Ernest Hemingway (No. 13 in 1936); Carl Sandburg (No. 17 in 1936); John Steinbeck (a newcomer); Nobel Prizewinner T. S. Eliot (No. 20 in 1936); H. L. Mencken; George Santayana; Edna St. Vincent Millay (No. 4 in 1936).