People: The Social Graces

Interviewed for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune, Washington’s No. 1 unofficial hostess Gwendolyn Cafritz carefully explained why she does not invite Mr. & Mrs. Harry Truman to her parties: “I never invited Mr. Truman when he was a Senator, which was my mistake. I never had anything against him. It’s just that I never thought the Trumans attracted me. I only ask people that are really exciting. Besides, Mr. Truman doesn’t like to talk to ladies.” How about Senator Joe McCarthy? “Joe’s a friend of mine, but I haven’t invited him this year. I just can’t take it any more.” Had she ever honored Price Boss Mike Di Salle with an invitation? “No, he wouldn’t look nice around my table. I like my tables to be filled with attractive women and handsome men, people like General Hoyt Vandenberg, who couldn’t look more divine, and Tony Biddle, who just looks wonderful.”

When they got word that five-star Generals Omar Bradley and George C. Marshall were checking into Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria, current residence of five-star General Douglas MacArthur, and that Vice President Alben W. Barkley was also arriving, hotel protocol experts went into a huddle, reached a solution that seemed to satisfy everyone. MacArthur’s red five-star flag, usually flown at the front entrance, was moved around to another door in honor of all three generals. The white Veep flag (13 stars and the American eagle) was hoisted over the main door. But later the experts learned that their solution was not quite right after all. As Secretary of Defense, General Marshall rated his own blue standard (four stars and an eagle).

The British Broadcasting Corp. caught a blast from fiery Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham when it offered him a picayunish fee of $60 for a broadcast of “his arrangement of Michael Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl. The “arrangement,” wrote Sir Thomas, already a bit edgy from an attack of gout, “has involved the thoughts of 25 years … at no time and nowhere in the course of a long career have I received such a preposterously inadequate, thoughtlessly impudent and magnificently inept offer from anyone.” Thoroughly singed by the explosion, an abashed BBC hastily made a “substantially higher” offer, and Sir Thomas accepted.

Among the swank set at Deauville, France there were two versions as to how Aly Khan picked up the massive shiner on his right eye. Popular version: dining at a restaurant without his usual companion of late, Cinemactress Joan Fontaine, he let his eye rove too obviously toward a nearby beauty whose husband’s aim was right on target. Aly’s story: “My physical instructor hit me accidentally with his head.”

Since he had failed to reduce in time to meet the deadline for his new picture,

M-G-M postponed its shooting schedule, sadly announced that it had shipped its 240-lb. singing star Mario Lanza (TIME, Aug. 6) off to the Oregon woods to diet, chop wood for a month,’ and slim down to a reasonable 180 Ibs.

After almost five months in Britain, Cinemactress Judy Garland arrived in Manhattan chubbier by several pounds. Said she: “Right now I’m overdoing this pleasingly plump business. But I don’t care. I never felt better in my life. Special dieting to knock off the poundage in a hurry for a picture is really murder. That’s what was wrong with me early this year when I had a nervous breakdown. And for that reason I certainly sympathize with people like Mario Lanza. This time I’m going to take diet and reducing much slower.”

The Young in Heart

In Stockton, Calif., Amos Alonzo Stagg, football’s lean and slippered pantaloon, sat down to his 89th birthday dinner (half cup of pea soup, two ears of corn, peaches and milk—”Never any fuss about birthdays at our house”) and made plans for his 62nd year of coaching. This fall he will return to Susquehanna University, Selinsgrove, Pa., where he has been co-coach with his son Amos Alonzo Jr., 52, for the past four years.

To honor Hometown Rhymester Edgar A. Guest on his 70th birthday, Detroit proclaimed an official “Eddie Guest Day” with a band concert and engraved scroll, but banned other gifts. Reason: the committee was afraid donors would take up all the program time making speeches.

Muscleman Bernarr (“Body Love”) Macfadden, who made a parachute jump on his 81st birthday, changed his mind about parachuting into the Niagara River to celebrate his 83rd, decided instead to mark the event at home in Dansville, N.Y. by simply eating a whole wheat cake and announcing a prize of $1,000 for the best three-act play about his life.

On his 81st birthday in Manhattan, Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch posed beside a mammoth birthday cake (“I can’t tell you who sent it. The same person who has sent it to me for 50 years would be very annoyed with me if I told who it was”) and gave some advice for the troubled times: “Don’t bellyache, Get out and work—this country will pull through.”

Out of the Past

The Paris Opéra Ballet announced plans to move the body of Dancer Waslaw Nijinsky from London, where he died last year, and give it a final place of honor in the Montmartre Cemetery next to the grave of Auguste Vestris, France’s ballet idol at the end of the 18th Century.

In London, a group of prominent clergy and laymen proposed that St. George’s Church in Gravesend, where Pocahontas, wife of John Rolfe and savior of Captain John Smith, has been buried since 1617, be dedicated as a shrine to Christian unity. Said the London Times: “One who tried to reconcile her own primitive American people with the invading white men is perhaps no bad patroness for a church dedicated … to the idea of unity—unity both of the American and British nations and of the Christian churches. It should be a matter of pride to see that the appeal now launched is as well supported in this country as elsewhere.”

Near Bordentown, NJ. the 476-ft. Grille, once proud pleasure yacht of Adolf Hitler, later bought by Textile Millionaire George Arida, went under the torches of a salvage crew, to be cut up and sent to the national defense scrap pile.