People: Postscripts & Afterthoughts

“For my money, Mickey Mouse is really the only true art that has come out of Hollywood,” said Maurice Evans during a radio discussion with Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt, in turn, recalled another ardent admirer: “My husband always loved Mickey Mouse and we always had to have it in the White House.”

A shy, studious young man of 18 taking beginners’ climbs on the easy trails of Yosemite with the Stanford University Alpine Club but otherwise inconspicuous and unnoticed among 7,400 students, was rounding out his freshman year: Jon Morrow Lindbergh, eldest of five children of Charles and Anne Lindbergh.

Germany’s famed aircraft designer, Willy Messerschmitt, 52, who went in for building prefabricated houses after the war, had his eyes on the plane market again. In Cape Town after a session with Prime Minister Daniel Malan, he was busy raising capital to start a jet plane factory in Johannesburg.

In tribute to Richard Coeur de Lion, who exempted their products from customs duties eight centuries ago, 44 Bordeaux winegrowers journeyed to London’s Parliament Square, where they sprinkled some rich Bordeaux earth around the king’s statue with the words, “In your blood were all the riches of our land; in your terrifying vitality there flashed the love of life that comes … from our vine-covered hillsides.”

The Social Graces

Wrote Hearst Society Columnist Cobina Wright who was born on an Oregon ranch: “It seems to me that there is a great deal of unnecessary and adverse comment being made by columnists about

Rita Hayworth having lost her Brooklyn accent and assumed a British inflection. I cannot see why anyone should be criticized for self-improvement.”

In full bay, Hollywood gossip hounds followed their latest trail, a rift between Cinemactor Clark Gable and his fourth wife, Sylvia. The baying grew louder when she boarded a plane for a two-week vacation in the Bahamas alone. When photographers asked for a parting marital kiss, Gable huffed: “We don’t do that in public,” then changed his mind and obliged.

Manhattan’s Federal Judge Harold Medina, one of the notable jurists in Dallas for the opening of Southern Methodist University’s new Legal Center (see EDUCATION) doffed his formal grey Homburg for a blue-green five-gallon Stetson (“I feel like a damn fool in the thing”), then climbed aboard an old stagecoach provided by his host the Dallas Bar Association, rode out to take in his first rodeo and outdoor barbecue at a nearby ranch party.

On opening night of the Technicolored The Tales of Hoffmann in London’s Carlton Theater, Dancing Star Robert Help-mann was presented to 83-year-old Queen Mary, who said graciously, “I think the film is very beautiful, and I particularly liked your voice.” Replied Helpmann with a bow, “I wish it were my own,” humbly explained to Her Majesty that the singing voices had been dubbed in.

London reporters jumped at the chance to interview Hollywood Director John Huston, his stars Humphrey Bogart (with wife Lauren Bacall “going along for the ride”) and Katharine Hepburn, all on their way to Tanganyika to film C. S. Forester’s The African Queen. As the crowd met for noon cocktails and questions, Miss Hepburn jumped at the chance to get off some inside comments (which saw solemn print next day). Dressed in an oatmeal-colored slack suit and flat brown shoes, easily stealing the scene from Mrs. Bogart who wore only a black & white Paris suit, she burbled: “I’ve been wearing trousers for years … I know I’m plain and scrawny. I’m tall, skinny, but very determined. I used to be agonized by my freckles. Now I just don’t attempt to hide them. They’re not madly ugly, are they? . . . Only the really plain people know about love. The very fascinating ones try so hard to create an impression they soon exhaust their talents.”

The Dim View

Feeling that his entry would be against the best interests of the country, the State Department announced that it had refused a U.S. visa to France’s jaunty Maurice Chevalier, a signer of the Communist-inspired Stockholm “peace” petition, a member of some Communist-front groups. Chevalier, now headed for Canada, has appealed the decision to the U.S. Attorney General.

A federal district court jury in Fort Scott, Kans. found Publisher Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (10¢ Little Blue Books) guilty on two counts of income-tax evasion: 1945, when he reported an income of $9,000 instead of $60,000; and 1947, with $8,000 rather than $24,000.

Near Durban, Natal, 150 fellow Indians gathered to watch Manilal Gandhi, 58-year-old son of the late Mahatma, sip a glass of lemon juice, honey and hot water, to break his 14-day fast held in protest over South Africa’s segregation laws. Gandhi, 20 Ibs. lighter, announced that he would ask the South African government once again to change its laws, before breaking one of the laws himself as a further protest.