People: Golden Moments

Lolling in his Cuban farmhouse, dressed only in shorts and a highball, Ernest Hemingway posed as a hairy-chested prop for a fashion picture in Vogue. Referring to him as “a famous presence in Cuba,” the caption was mostly concerned with the model’s lavender silk get-up and straw shoes.

Guest of honor at a Manhattan exhibition of her late husband’s pompadoured beauties: Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson, 77. Dressed in a trim dark suit draped with orchids, the “Original Gibson Girl” posed before a portrait drawn of her half a century ago.

Believing that “a woman past 35 needs a man’s company all the more,” oldtime Cinemactress Miriam Hopkins, 46, went to her astrologer, got the cheering news that her next big romance “would occur sometime in 1951.” Said she: “I was so excited to hear that that I rushed out and bought a new car.”

Favorite exhibit on a floating waxworks plying the rivers and canals of Belgium and France: a Pullman car scene, labeled “Honeymoon in Arizona,” with Mickey Rooney in an upper berth, Judy Garland in a lower, both gazing at some painted Indians.

After Thinking It Over

In Nashville, after a bout with Dixie cooking, Illinois-born Monologuist Cornelia Otis Skinner had one question: “Why aren’t all Southern women as fat as Kate Smith?”

Visiting at a Manhattan Book Fair for children, stage & screen Bogeyman Boris Karloff called for more realism and violence in moppets’ books. A diet of namby-pamby stories, he said, gives “the younger generation a completely distorted picture of the world we live in and leaves them totally unequipped to cope with the world’s very real problems.”

Lecturing in Manhattan, British Philosopher and Nobel Prizewinner Bertrand Russell predicted a future genetics contest between Russia and the U.S. “to breed a race stronger, more intelligent, and more resistant to disease than any race of man that has hitherto existed.”

After “working real hard at it,” Jack Dempsey passed his real estate brokers’ exam in California with a grade of 85, took his diploma, then hung out a gilt-lettered shingle in Beverly Hills and waited for the customers.

Noting that last year’s divorce rate in Baltimore was near the 3,000 mark, professional Meal Sampler Duncan Hines concluded: “There must be something wrong with the cooking here.”

The London Daily Express wondered whether authors like to reread their own books, asked a few, found Evelyn Wauqh an ardent admirer of Waugh, especially his latest novel Helena, which he had read “20 times” since its publication.

“My opinion may be unpopular,” wrote Columnist-Senator Margaret Chase Smith, “but I am very tired of seeing car after car with slain deer strapped to the fenders and hoods … I don’t see how a hunter can level his gun against the sad eyes of a deer and shoot to kill. What sport is there in this?”

For the first time in 31 years, crusty old John Nance Garner, pushing 82, remained on his Uvalde ranch and passed up the opening of Texas’ deer hunting season. Said he: “Don’t feel too good.”

In Pearl Harbor, Secretary of the Navy Francis P. (“Rowboat”) Matthews said he was off on a tour of the Pacific “in order to better equip myself for performance of my duties.”

“He was one of great dignity and good humor, remarkable courage and a certain reserve,” said Commentator Elmer Davis to the Washington Post) speaking of his late great & good friend, General Gray, a Persian cat that died last week, aged 19.

Take It or Leave It

In Chicago, when the National Association of Bedding Manufacturers offered buxom Mae West the title of “Mattress Queen of 1950,” plus $1,000 to do a two-minute movie sleeping on a mattress, Mae declined: “It’s not dignified. I can’t accept, because my honor’s at stake.”

Once again, Candidate Joseph Stalin registered as candidate for the job of deputy in Moscow’s Regional Soviet.

Still digging away on the problem of U.S. sex habits, Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey found his research momentarily stymied when U.S. customs men refused delivery on a package of books, photographs and etchings from Europe because they were “dirty and obscene.” Kinsey, huffed Kinsey, is a scientific researcher, and the stuff was merely “scientific material.”

Wrote Novelist J. B. (The Good Companions) Priestley to the London News Chronicle: “We live in an age when no man of any importance ever admits he was wrong . . . Infallibility is cheaper than rotten herring … I said after the war there would be a wonderful popular appreciation of the best literature, drama, music, and the visual arts … I was wrong. And now, gentlemen, step up.”

To a home-state crowd in Charleston, W.Va. Louis Johnson said: “I have an abiding faith that West Virginians and my family will never have any occasion to be ashamed of anything I did, or did not do, as Secretary of Defense of the United States.”