People, Dec. 6, 1937

PEOPLE

“Names make news.” Last week these names made this news:

Capitalizing on news-accounts of John Nance Garner’s criticism of his wife’s new hat (“It makes you look like a flapper”—TIME, Nov. 29), Manhattan’s publicity-wise Arnold Constable & Co. dispatched a representative to Mrs. Garner with a dozen matronly hats, offered them to her as a gift. Valued at $169, all size 23. the assortment included a black felt brimmed model with green, lavender and red bows, a toque with iridescent feathers and odd-angled quills, a visor brimmed type with veil in front, a bumper roller with wraith of veil in the rear. Mrs. Garner refused to open the boxes, refused to accept the hats.

To London dinner guests, the Earl of Mansfield, reputable British ornithologist, told how the local birthrate had soared after he stocked his Dumfriesshire estate with storks. Two housewives barren ten years were barren no longer, another became pregnant 15 years after the birth of her last child. His storks now dead, the Earl explained he would not import a fresh batch because “my workers have told me rather forcibly that, if I do, they will shoot the whole lot.”

Chicago Opera’s Tenor Giovanni Mattinelli caught cold, told Impresario Paul Longone he would be unable to sing Pollione in Norma that night. To three other tenors went Mr. Longone. None of them knew the part. Frantically he telephoned to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Tenor Frederick Jagel. Tubby Tenor Jagel caught a plane, flew 700-odd miles to Chicago’s Municipal Airport, drove into the Loop behind police escort, trotted perspiring into the opera house, squirmed into a costume, bobbed on stage half-an-hour late, stumbled on a mossy step beside the Druids’ oak, lost a shoe.

Last August, after 20-year-old Yehudi Menuhin announced he would give Robert Schumann’s “lost” violin concerto its world premiere (TIME Aug. 23), the German Government announced it would pre-empt the initial hearing for its official anniversary Reichskultürkammer in Berlin. In Richmond, Va. last fortnight, Violinist Menuhin listened to a short-wave broadcast of Aryan George Kulenkampff’s interpretation of the concerto, praised the German as “a violinist of the first rank” regretted that “the edition played was not the original.” Father Moshe Menuhin was less complacent: “It was Yehudi who discovered it. … Kulenkampff gave a distorted, garbled version by another composer. …” Yehudi plans to play the original version next month in St. Louis.

After three weeks’ detention at Ellis Island at the French Line’s expense, Mme Magdeleine La Ferrière (“Magda de Fontages”) was ordered deported to France by U. S. District Court Judge Samuel Mandelbaum, who called her Paris coup de pistolet at Count Charles Pineton de Chambrun (TIME, Nov. 22) “an act of baseness, vileness or depravity.” Few hours later, free under a $1,000 bail bond, she was ferried to Manhattan to await the outcome of an appeal to the U. S. Circuit Court. Same day Judge Mandelbaum’s ruling was made, members of the cast of Manhattan’s bankrupt and closed French Casino, where Magda de Fontages was to cavort, sailed on the Normandie, weeping bitterly. Said one: “We gave New York some of the best nudes they’ve ever seen here.”

In Europe for the second time this year, Pennsylvania’s ambitious Governor George H. Earle paused at Goteborg, Sweden, to radiorate and present two plaques commemorating the 300th anniversary of the departure of Sweden’s first emigrants to what is now Pennsylvania.

Motoring in his Ford roadster over wet roads from Soestdyk Palace to Amsterdam, The Netherlands, fast-driving Prince Consort Bernhard zu Lippe-Biesterfeld* saw a heavy sand-laden truck shoot out from a side road. Prince Bernhard slammed on his brakes, skidded, collided with the truck. With a slight concussion, a gash across his face, he was hospitalized, sewed up, put to sleep. His first visitor was Mother-in-Law Wilhelmina. Second visitor (against doctor’s orders): Wife Juliana, who expects to present him with an heir in January.

Off for visits to Rhodesian and South African jamborees, Chief Boy Scout Robert Stephenson Smyth, Baron Baden-Powell, 80, declared: “It is either going to kill or cure me. I don’t mind which it is, so long as I can carry through my work.”

* Last May on a racing track near London he was clocked at 100 m.p.h. while testing a new car.