People: Family Circles

Manhattan’s tabloids called it “The War of the Roses.” It started last July when Broadway Showman Billy Rose tried to suppress the news that blonde Joyce Mathews, divorced wife of Milton Berle, had attempted suicide in his Ziegfeld Theater apartment (TIME, July 23). Last week he was in trouble again. The scene was the same. His wife, former Olympic Swimmer Eleanor Holm, equipped with camera and a private detective at her side, raided the stronghold, found her husband “not alone.” With this evidence, she retired to their Beekman Place town house and bolted the doors. When Rose appeared, in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, photographers banged away at the blinking, bewildered husband as he fumbled with his key, vainly trying to unlock the door. Then he gave up, returned to his apartment to let the lawyers take over.

To the Armed Forces Wives’ Club in Boston, Mrs. George S. Patton admitted that “nothing is permanent but change” in the life of an Army wife. However, she said, one secret of making dismal rooms homelike is “always to keep a few sweet potatoes growing. They really make exotic vines.”

In Paris, after finishing her first movie, Monte Carlo Baby, Michelle Farmer, 19-year-old daughter of Gloria Swanson, announced that she was flying home to tell mother about her plans to marry Turkish-born Movie Producer Robert Amon, 36. Said she: “As a kid I traveled with mother on enough one-night stands. I know what an awful lot of heartbreak and struggle goes into a stage career. If there’s a choice, you’re crazy not to take a home and a family.”

In Manhattan, Alice Hammerstein, 30, daughter of Musical Comedy Writer Oscar Hammerstein II, was busy writing the lyrics for a musical which will be produced next year. Her father was “very pleased,” she said. “He has always wanted anything that will make me happy. Except when I wanted to be a veterinarian. He couldn’t understand that.”

The Road Ahead

From Paris, the New York Times reported an observation of Philosopher Albert Schweitzer: “The great sickness of man is that he is constantly seeking entertainment and more entertainment, sometimes of the stupidest and more cruel type, instead of finding stimulation from within. Look into some aspects of sports and boxing and you’ll see what I mean. Seneca was one of the first to speak out against the combat of the gladiators. Isn’t there possibly a parallel between the decadence of the declining Roman Empire and our own overemphasis on mass hysteria stimulated by some mass sports?”

Playwright Clare Boothe Luce, winner of the 1951 Newman Club award for outstanding service in church and government, spoke out against one of the weaknesses of world government. At the Newman Club Federation convention in Wentworth-by-the-sea, N. H., she said: “The United Nations offers a tragic example of the frustration to which the most idealistic efforts of materialist man is doomed. The U.N. is a failure, not because unity among nations is undesirable or impossible. It is a failure because the spiritual conditions of unity are not present.”

Professor Mortimer J. Adler, who helped start the University of Chicago’s Great Books course, arrived in San Francisco to give a series of lectures on the culture of the Western world, and told reporters that he was worried about the current difference between Eastern and Western writing. Said he: “The Western authors are all talking to each other, and the East is not a part of the conversation . . . Modern Eastern literature is devoted exclusively to present social, industrial and political revolutions. If these revolutions continue, Eastern books will soon stop being literature.”

Great Days

Going along with the army on its weeklong autumn maneuvers, Sweden’s 69-year-old King Gustav VI proved his mettle as a soldier and a botanist both. He kept a front-line pace with his battle commanders and had a few words to say on the lack of offensive spirit in his troops. Once, as a line of firing tanks roared past, he stopped to pick up a small flower which none of his generals could identify. Said the beaming King: “It’s rather rare, in our parts at least, a Gentiana campestris.”

For her war work, entertaining troops in Africa and France, the French embassy invited Marlene Dietrich to Washington, where Ambassador Henri Bonnet presented her with the Order of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. After he pinned on the Maltese cross and handed her a scroll, he kissed her warmly on both cheeks. Asked to hold the pose, the Ambassador obliged. Said he: “It’s one of the few times that one welcomes the photographer’s plea for just one more picture.”

Composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose music has taken him in & out of the Kremlin’s good graces, seemed to have scored again on the credit side. Top Soviet critics and composers applauded the premiere of his latest work: Ten Poems, arranged for a mixed chorus with children’s voices and based on the essays Democratic Vistas, written by an anarchic old yawper, Walt Whitman.