People: The Calloused Hand

Turinese Tailor Antonio Santomauro, who made the elaborately embroidered Mantle of Peace worn by Pope Pius XII for special ceremonies, was busily stitching away at two more peace jackets. One, of Tibet wool, double-breasted with four gold buttons and an embroidered globe carried by two small doves, will go to Harry Truman. To Joseph Stalin, courtesy of Tailor Santomauro, will go a single-breasted job, buttoned to the throat, with one embroidered dove.

In Manhattan, warming up for her debut as a pro, Gertrude (“Gorgeous Gussie”) Moron modeled her latest play to the tennis galleries: leopard-skin panties. Undecided what to wear on her six-month tour of the country, she thought it would be “something simple, made out of better material than the dresses for amateur matches”—perhaps black velvet panties “completely covered except when I move.”

In Chicago for a series of lectures, T. S. (The Cocktail Party) Eliot, 62, mused: “The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest . . . You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down . . . Basically I am a very lazy man . . . After Christmas I will try to get down to doing another play. I know that no one ever has two successes in a row, so I am writing the next play for a small out-of-the-way theater in London . . . You must go on living day to day, but you cannot go on . . . without hope. If there is not hope, then we would all lie down and expire.”

Said Hollywood Tough Guy John Garfield: “I’m not tough . . . Hell, I haven’t had a fight since I was 13.”

James A. Farley, in Spain for his third visit since the war, had a 40-minute chat with Franco, failed to get official permission to enlarge his Barcelona Coca-Cola plant.

Home from the hospital, nursing his recently fractured thigh, George Bernard Shaw, 94, confided to a visitor: “I don’t think I shall ever write anything more.” Otherwise, said his doctors, their patient was doing well; he was allowed to leave his bed for 90 minutes a day to take wheelchair tours of his flower beds (see cut) and soak up the autumn sun.

The Yankees’ pitching pride, Southpaw Eddie Ford, 21, was awaiting another decision: results of his second draft physical to find out whether an intestinal bug picked up in Mexico two winters ago had gone away.

The Furrowed Brow

Dosed with penicillin and fighting a cold, Marlene (the “World’s Most Glamorous Grandma”) Dietrich arrived in London 24 hours behind schedule to play a middle-aged film star in the film No Highway. She still had time to call a press conference and set reporters straight on a matter of figures. Said she: “I am 44, not 47.”

Speaking at Western Reserve University, David Lilienthal, onetime boss of the Atomic Energy Commission, decried scaremongering, but conceded that “any person who wants to live a peaceful, quiet, uneventful life has just picked the wrong time to live.”

Excited rumors ran through Paris that France’s No. 1 Communist Maurice Thorez had been liquidated, but it turned out he was merely resting comfortably in his villa after getting treatment for high blood pressure, brought on, said his doctors, by “physical and intellectual overexertion.”

Back in Boston for the first time since she declared war on Harvard ten years ago when the Lampoon voted her the movie star least likely to succeed, onetime Oomph Girl Ann Sheridan was in a mellow, forgiving mood. “I’m not worried any more about what Harvard University thinks of me … By the way whatever happened to that editor? It would be interesting to know what he is doing in 1950.”*

The Metropolitan Opera’s Helen Traubel sounded a Wagnerian note for her home town when she announced that she had bought into the St> Louis Browns, perennial sad sacks of the American League. The deal was no gamble, said she: “I know they are going to do something . . . This is an investment in faith and in sentiment.”

From a federal jail in Manhattan where he has served five months of his one-year sentence for contempt of Congress, pudgy Eugene Dennis, general secretary of the U.S. Communist Party, answered a query on the state of his health: “The carcass is scaled down somewhat . . . The mind is, of course, cogitating, and the spirit is fine. Everything is O.K. with me except for the loss of precious time.”

A last-moment hitch developed in the well-laid wedding plans of Cinemactor Errol Flynn, 41, and Hollywood Dancer Patrice Wymore, 23, when a French Lutheran clergyman suddenly withdrew the use of his church. The twice-divorced groom scurried about, thought he had found another, an abandoned church in Beaulieu-sur-Mer. Other reported plans: a civil ceremony in Monaco with an army guard of honor, peasants dancing in the streets, followed by a one-day honeymoon, the shortest of Flynn’s career.

Speaking of women in politics, Millicent Carey Mclntosh, dean of Barnard College, had a hunch that more girls would grow up to become Senators. But a lady President? Out of the question: “Other women wouldn’t vote for her . . . Women themselves are extremely conservative about other women. They still prefer men doctors or lawyers or bosses.”

Just Folks

The Illinois society of the Sons of the American Revolution polled its members to see who should get the annual Patriotism Award, found 9 to 1 in favor of the Chicago Tribune’s Colonel Robert (“Bertie”) McCormick, the state’s “greatest patriot of this generation.”

In Paris, President Vincent Aurlol stocked his pantry with almond milk and other dainties to welcome a visitor, thorny, willful Sidi Mohamed Ben Youssef, Sultan of Morocco. After a dervish whirl of partygoing, the Sultan doffed his white burnoose, slipped into hunting knickers for a shooting party at Marly-le-Roi where he bagged 76 pheasants, ten hares, two partridges.

For the U.N. blood bank in Tokyo, Prince Takamatsu, younger brother of Emperor Hirohito, parted with 300 cc of his royal blood, then grinned broadly as he prepared to down a glass of apple juice.

Because English weather did not agree with his ailing mother, Queen Aliyah, Iraq’s sloe-eyed boy King, Feisal II, 15, decided to change schools, checked out of Harrow and flew home to sunny Baghdad to enter the Iraqi Military College.

For a medical research benefit, a New York auction gallery held a famous-name rummage sale, bagged such customer-catching donations as a Paisley shawl from Irene Dunne, the bat Joe DiMaggio used for his home run in the last World Series, Sigmund Romberg’s original score for When I Grow Too Old to Dream, a Toscanini baton, a self-portrait of Enrico Caruso.

Mohamed Reza Pahlevi, the Shah of Iran, divorced from beauteous Princess Fawzia, sister of Egypt’s tubby King Farouk, announced that his next wife would be a commoner, pretty Soraya Esfandiari, 19, granddaughter of a tribal chief. The wedding date: Dec. 27, birthday of Mohamed.

In a three-car caravan with physician, secretary and seven servants, Belgium’s King Leopold and his Princess de Rethy, who is expecting, arrived at Abano, Italy. He planned to join the rheumatics for some quiet mud baths; she would take some slow, countryside motor trips.

*The Lampoon’s 1940 editor, W. Russell Bowie Jr., is now European research editor for the U.S. State Department’s Intelligence Division.