People, Apr. 2, 1951

The Literary Set

A London court announced that George Bernard Shaw had left a gross estate worth $1,028,254.22. The playwright’s will made small bequests to servants, friends and relatives; cleared the way at last to publishing his “intellectual love” letters to Mrs. Patrick Campbell; forbade any monument to him which contained “a cross or other instrument of torture or blood sacrifice”; directed that the bulk of the estate be used to promote his “simplified” alphabet.*

Shortly before his death, reported the New York Times Book Review, Sinclair Lewis had reached a decision: “America is too big for the Great American Novel. America’s impossible to grasp.”

Television’s ubiquitous Milton Berle announced that after two years of spare-time writing he had finished a novel. “I’d read Sinclair Lewis and that fellow Ernest Hemingway,” said Berle, modestly, “and I got to thinking. For a first novel, I think it’s all right.”

Madame Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, India’s ambassador to both the U.S. and Mexico, was working on the last few pages of her autobiography, Sunlight and Shadow, signed another contract for a book on India’s problems, and hoped for time some day to do one on “the history of diplomacy.”

In Manhattan recently for his first taste of an author’s tea celebrating his war report, A Soldier’s Story, General Omar Bradley was asked if he had a favorite book. “Yes,” said the general, “Ivanhoe. I read it once a year.”

After five months in Johns Hopkins Hospital, following a stroke and heart attack which doctors predicted would be fatal, H. L. Mencken checked out for home, sardonically tipped his hat to the Y.M.C.A. as he passed, then asked what was playing at the local theater. Told it was Tarzan’s Peril, Mencken replied firmly, “I shall not be there.”

The People’s Choice

Asked to comment on the fact that she had been named one of the nation’s ten best-dressed women, Assistant Defense Secretary Anna M. Rosenberg admitted that the award was, indeed, a surprise. “I wear the same suits as last year, only a little more shiny.”

Emanuel Celler, who has served Brooklyn in Congress for the past 14 terms, penned a letter to the New York Times, listing the perfect Congressman’s qualities: “The friendliness of a child, the enthusiasm of a teenager, the assurance of a college boy, the tirelessness of a bill collector, the patience of a sacrificing wife, the diplomacy of a wayward husband, the curiosity of a cat, and the good humor of an idiot.”

In Washington, the Internal Revenue Department released a select Who’s Who of underworldlings whose income tax returns are getting a thorough going over. Among the 126 names: Joe Adonis; Ralph (“Bottles”) Capone, brother of “Scarface Al”; Anthony (“Little Augie” Pisano) Carfano; Louis (“Little New York”) Campagna; Paul (“The Waiter”) Ricca; Charles (“Cherry Nose”) Gioe; Frank Diamond; Rocco Fischetti; Vito Genovese; Irving (“Waxey Gordon”) Wexler and Frank Costello.

The Payoff

In the maze of Paris traffic, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko’s limousine swerved, toppled a pedestrian, got smacked by a car behind. Alexei Pavlov, Russia’s Ambassador to France, suggested a way to prevent similar accidents: let Soviet cars be escorted through the streets at 75 m.p.h., just like in Moscow.

Reporters in Paris discovered the person answering classified ads for a job in Britain was none other than Princess Djavidan, widow of Khedive Abbas Hilmi II, last hereditary King of Egypt. Said the ex-queen: “I used to have a whole country; now I look forward to a kitchen. I feel that with the British people I can start a new life more easily than with any other.”

Fresh from a cross-country concert tour, Metropolitan Soprano Helen Traubel turned up in Burbank, Calif, to check on one of her sideline investments: the hapless St. Louis Browns, midway through their spring tune-up. Part-Owner Traubel, in good voice, gave a pep talk to the players, then retired to a rooter’s bench to watch her team win (6 to 5) an exhibition game with the Cleveland Indians.

While waiting for the annual verdict of the Pulitzer Prize jury and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Broadway handed out its own laurels, the American Theater Wing’s Antoinette Perry Awards, for the season’s best work up to March 1. Best musical: Guys and Dolls. Best play: Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo. Other “Tonys” went to: Irving Berlin, Ethel Merman and Newcomer Russell Nype (for Call Me Madam); Uta Hagen (The Country Girl); Claude Rains (Darkness at Noon).

*Though Shaw’s proposed “alfabet” never got beyond the discussion stage, he had set down some ideas on the subject. He would 1) keep the present system except for x, c and q; 2) eliminate the neutral second vowels found in such words as colour, labour and honour; 3) substitute “unambiguous symbols” for the consonant combinations sh, zh, wh, th, dh, ng; also for the vowel-consonant combinations ah, aw, at, et, it, of, ut, oot, yoot.