People, Jul. 29, 1940

Adolf Hitler presented Benito Mussolini with a two-car armored train mounting 16 anti-aircraft guns, to protect “a life which is precious not only to the Italian people, but also to the German nation.”

All agog was Harlem last week over a tennis match to be held July 29. Contestants: Don Budge, professional champion, and 23-year-old Jimmy McDaniel of Los Angeles, Negro amateur champion. Never before have black and white champions met on the same tennis court.

Via London and Halifax, bemonocled French Journalist André Géraud (“Pertinax”), wanted by the Petain Government for spreading false information, slipped into Manhattan last week. Asked what he thought of England’s chance of fighting off a German invasion. Anglophile Géraud replied hopefully: “That they can stop the Nazis is more than wishful thinking.”

European exiles who arrived last week to take up temporary residence in the U. S.: Elsa Schiaparelli, Parisian couturiere (to lecture and get some clothes—she “hasn’t a hat to her name”); Madame Josef Beck, wife of Poland’s onetime Foreign Minister (now “somewhere in Rumania”); ex-Empress Zita of Austria and her youngest daughter. Archduchess Elisabeth (more ex-royal children to follow later); French Composer Darius Milhaud (Le pauvrc Matelot) with his wife and 10-year-old son; Novelist Julian Green (The Closed Garden, The Dark Journey}, pessimistic Paris-born American who has preferred to spend most of his life in France, and now finds France actually too pessimistic for him; Novelist Jules Remains, author of the monumental super-novel, Men of Good Will, still un finished after 18 volumes. Said Frenchman Romains: “The immense majority of France is against Fascism.”

To do her bit toward enlightening the people, Eleanor Roosevelt last week permitted herself to be smeared with grease paint, mascara, lip rouge. Next month, U. S. movie-goers will see their First Lady in the British-made, anti-Nazi film, Pastor Hall, whose American rights Son Jimmy has bought. In her prologue. Actress Roosevelt told why she approved the film.

Touring Northern California few weeks ago, Diego Rivera passed through the up right little town of Red Bluff, county seat of Tehema County. “This must be where Communism was founded.” he chuckled to friends, who repeated it to San Francisco newshawks. Last week, the pun reached Tehema County. Over an indignant front page story the local Corning Observer screamlined RED BLUFF NOT NAMED FOR COMMUNISTS.

Formed in New-Orleans last week was the Order of the American Razzberry. Based on the antitotalitarian Fourth of July speech,* delivered by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes (TIME, July 15) and said to be written by Poet Archibald MacLeish, the new order will decorate “all stuffed shirts, politicians or others, who prove themselves friends of Adolf Hitler … by hampering and slowing up the national defense of the U. S.” Highest decoration: “the American Razzberry Rampant upon a Nazi Swastika Couchant.” Lesser: “the Crooked Double Cross.”

* Excerpt: “. . . And here is this orator telling you that democracy is all through and that liberty is decadent. . . . When are you going to laugh, Americans? When is the great, hard, angry, shouting, razzberry laugh of the American people going to yell? . . .”