Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
Oscar-winning Cinemactress Olivia de Havilland, 37, who once observed that a good husband should be “as placid as a millpond in July,” posed for photographers in Hollywood with her new fiance, Paris Magazine Writer Pierre Galante, 42, whom she plans to marry soon after her divorce from Novelist Marcus (Delilah) Goodrich becomes final next week.
Seventy-eight years old and still ministering to the natives of French Equatorial Africa, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, medical missionary-philosopher-musician, was looking to the future. In a letter of thanks (for a supply of pills) to H. B. Burns, president of the U.S. Vitamin Corp., Schweitzer wrote: “I should like to accomplish some long-undertaken and far-progressed works … in the realm of philosophy, history, religion and music … At the same time, I have to keep myself in as good shape as possible for as long a time as possible for my hospital’s sake … It needs me for a while yet.”
Of reports that he might become president of the University of Maryland, Harry Truman said, “There is no truth in it,” added with finality, “I don’t expect to be a college president.” Of talk that she would run for Congresswoman from Missouri in 1954, Margaret Truman was “not going to as far as I know. I do hope I can take part in the campaign, but not as a candidate.”
The French postal strike (see FOREIGN NEWS), which set communications in France back to the 17th century, was too much for the Aga Khan, who had come to Aix-les-Bains for a peaceful fortnight. He left town in a huff (actually, in a green Rolls Royce with red leather upholstery) and headed for the 20th century in Lausanne. Switzerland, followed by his chauffeur, maid and luggage in a second car. “The Aga Khan,” it was explained, “receives and sends many letters and needs to make frequent phone calls abroad.”
Home to a tumultuous welcome in Papakura, New Zealand, Sir Edmund Hillary, co-conqueror of Mt. Everest, made all sorts of news. He announced plans to marry a New Zealand music student in September; obliged photographers by flopping his 6 ft. 3 in. into a symbolic white victory chair built on skis which admirers presented to him; and he told how he first heard of his knighthood. “We were strolling down a mountain pass about halfway to Katmandu,” he said. “We had long beards and looked extremely disreputable—in fact, like I do in Papakura. A Sherpa came along with letters, and there was one . . . addressed to ‘Sir Edmund Hillary, K.B.E.’ You have heard how your whole life is supposed to pass before your eyes at these times. Well, I could see myself walking down Broadway, Papakura, in my tattered overalls and the seat out of my pants, and I thought, ‘That is gone forever. I will have to buy a new pair of overalls now.’ ”
British-born Cinemactress Deborah Kerr, who sluffed off the prim & proper style that Hollywood thrust on her to play a sweater girl in From Here to Eternity, arrived in Manhattan (to rehearse for her first play in the U.S.) with a vision of the future. “I’d like to do as much as possible while my face and figure hold up,” she mused. “Then I’d like to buy a place outside Florence where I’ll paint. Then one day some people will come by, and one will say, ‘Do you see that elderly lady with the floppy hat? She used to be a good-looking movie star.’ And the friend probably will say, ‘What are movies?’ ”
In Apple Valley, Calif., a $16,000 “Appreciation House” was put up in 45 hours by volunteer workers, equipped and furnished by volunteer merchants, and turned over to Jet Ace Captain Joseph C. McConnell, his wife and three children as a neighborly thank-you for his 106 Korean war missions and 16 MIG kills.
Vienna-born Movie Producer Otto (The Moon Is Blue) Preminger was asked to come to Manhattan to straighten out a little matter with his exwife, Marion Mill Preminger. She wants $48,800, which she claims is due her under their 1949 separation and alimony agreements. While she endures a “virtual hand-to-mouth existence,” he lives high off the hog, she charged. “It is no secret that [he and his second wife] enjoy an outstanding reputation for lavishness in entertainment . . .”
For speaking well of the Red Astrachan in an editorial on “The August Apple,” the New York Herald Tribune got a folksy letter from a satisfied reader: Apple Fancier Mildred Austin, wife of onetime Vermont Senator and U.N. Delegate Warren R. Austin. “After an absence of approximately twenty-two years …” she chatted, “we are living permanently in our Burlington, Vt. home, where my husband is able to devote much of his time to his beloved orchard, renewing daily his devotion to the United Nations in his international orchard . . . During the month of August the aroma of a deep apple pie, or a dish of warm apple sauce, made from freshly hand-picked Red Astrachans . . . is seldom out of our kitchen, adding just one more joy to life in the country—especially Vermont.”
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