People: Outrageous Fortune

A sheriff’s sale of her effects in Manhattan, including $230 for a desk and $1.30 apiece for 13 used sheets, brought a total of $3,400 to the creditors of wispy Viennese Actress Elisabeth Bergner, 50, currently touring Australia.

Britain’s Secretary of State for Scotland, Hector McNeil, 40, choked on a breakfast fishbone, had to be rushed to Westminster Hospital to have it removed.

In Blackwell, Okla., trying to purr her way out of a $10 fine for an 80-miles-an-hour speeding ticket, hot-tempered Katharine (As You Like It) Hepburn backed into a courthouse stove, singed her mink coat. When the judge tried to soothe her with “It probably didn’t hurt that $1,000 coat too much,” the smoldering Hepburn snapped: “This coat cost me $5,500.”

Loudmouthed Actor Orson Welles was at it again. In a series of articles for a Paris weekly on his recent tour of Germany, he confessed that “I knocked out the tooth of a German who gave the Hitler salute.” Furthermore, said he, most Germans were hypochondriacs who still sang the Horst Wessel in every nightclub. Result: indignant Germans were boycotting all Welles’s pictures, with an estimated $250,000 loss to U.S. moviemakers at German box offices.

Back from Hollywood for a quick visit to London, dewy-eyed Cinemactress Jean Simmons ran smack into a coldhearted British customs regulation. Since she had owned it less than a year, she owed $8,400 in taxes (duty and purchase) on her sparkling new engagement diamond from Cinemactor Stewart Granger. Said she, leaving the ring with customsmen to be retrieved on her departure: “I was dying to show it to Mum and all my friends.”

Sunlight & Shadow

While the Fiat factory in Turin was tailoring “the most luxurious train in the world,” complete with a rose silk bedroom, for Egypt’s tubby King Farouk, his chubby fiancée, Narriman Sadek, 17, was reported in Milan quietly shopping for some pink silk sheets.

Out from copyright protection and into the public domain this week went the music of Sir Arthur (The Lost Chord, The Mikado) Sullivan and the writings of Oscar Wilde.

In one of her rare public appearances, Greta Garbo, 44, braved the gaze of immigration officers in Los Angeles, signed on the dotted line asking for her final U.S. citizenship papers, was told she could take her exam next month.

Always ready for a publicity gag, David Rubinoff, sad-eyed Schmalz King of the fiddle, waltzed into an Omaha pawnshop, asked for a $100 loan on his $100,000 Stradivarius, got a top offer of $10.

Said New York Police Commissioner Thomas F. Murphy to the Cleveland Bar Association: “You could no more get a 100% honest police department than you could get a 100% honest newspaper. Even Ivory Soap doesn’t claim to be 100% pure.”

The Communist press in the Balkans was throwing some wild punches at Joe Louis. He was, said the slap-happy writers, “a gangster” of “imperialistic sport,” using “his former sporting glory to make propaganda for war.”

On prize night, the Communist World Peace Congress in Warsaw divided its International Peace Prize for Arts between Painter Pablo Picasso, a dabbler in Communism, and Paul Robeson, the comrades’ favorite baritone.

A donation of $23 collected by Latvian D.P.s as an anti-Communist fund and sent to Indiana’s Governor Henry Schricker was promptly returned. Give it to the churches, said the governor. Christianity, not money, is the proper weapon to fight Communism.

Ruffles & Flourishes

For a state dinner at Claridge’s Hotel, London, Queen Juliana of The Netherlands and Prince Bernhard brought along 4,000 Dutch “Happiness” roses, six palace chefs and the royal silver service. After the party there were presents for the hard-working staff—including the hotel manager (the Chevalier of the Order of Orange-Nassau) and the seven porters, seven cloakroom attendants and two carriage lackies (bronze medals of honor).

Still maintaining his average of an honor a week, Bernard Baruch received the Mormon Medal of Honor for “unselfish and distinguished services” to his fellow men. Also honored with the same medal: Herbert Hoover.

Elected to honorary membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters: India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Novelists Andre Gide and Ignazio (Bread and Wine) Silone, Historian Arnold Toynbee.

For the eleventh successive year, Old Boy Winston Churchill traveled down to Harrow’s annual songfest, requested John Peel, Hearts of Oak and a tune called The Island, which he had sung as a student almost 60 years ago.

A nostalgic group of Hoosiers in Boston caught up with Indiana’s favorite songster, clabber-voiced Composer Hoagy (Rockin’ Chair) Carmichael, and presented him with a 150-year-old Salem rocking chair. Said Hoagy from a comfortable slouch: “A good rocking chair is like music, sort of has euphony. It takes no effort to make it rock.”