People: People, Feb. 18, 1946

Will Rogers Jr., 35, set out to add to the U.S. scene a new kind of public character: a U.S. Senator who was also a Hollywood star. Ex-Congressman Rogers (who resigned to join the Army in 1944) prepared to: 1) run for Senator from California; 2) play the title role in a Warner Bros, movie about his late, gum-chewing, rope-twirling father.

Elliott Roosevelt planned a U.S. lecture tour, and Winston Churchill’s bumptious son Randolph reportedly had the same idea. (A possible brothers-under-the-skin act nobody would talk about: a debate between the two.) But first Elliott had to finish writing a book. It was about his father’s role in world affairs, and “the story of my father’s thinking.”

Away from It All

Karl Marx, whose Das Kapital is the Bible of Communism, had visitors. To his grave in London’s jampacked Highgate Cemetery came Andrei Vishinsky, at the head of Russia’s UNO delegation, and deposited on the bearded prophet’s plain stone slab a wreath of lilies and red carnations.

Abraham Lincoln (in bronze) had visitors in Manhattan’s soapbox center, Union Square: a delegation from the National Republican Club, which deposited a wreath of ivy.

Henry L. Mencken appealed to a Baltimore court to restore to him his fireside social life, nocturnal rest, capacity to concentrate on his work, and general peace of mind—all gone now, said he. The thief of his serenity, deposed the editor-critic-raconteur-philologist’s petition, was a dog next door who passed his life barking—a “large, powerful male dog of breed or breeds unknown to your orator.” The barking, pursued Mencken, was “abnormally and extraordinarily loud, harsh, penetrating, violent, unpleasant, and distracting.” He prayed that the court would compel his neighbor to take dog and bark away. The court gave Dog Owner Charles Fortenbaugh 15 days for a neighborly answer.

Female Talent

Dr. Lise Meitner, 67, refugee German physicist, pioneer contributor to the atomic bomb, was the Women’s National Press Club’s choice for “woman of the year.” Also huzzah’d: Dean Virginia Gildersleeve, 68, of Manhattan’s Barnard College; All-But-Abstract Painter Georgia O’Keeffe, 58; Choreographer Agnes de Mille, 36; Novelist I. A. R. Wylie (The Young In Heart), 60; Johns Hopkins Psychiatrist Esther Loring Richards, 60; Shakespearean Actress-Director Margaret Webster, 40; Radio Program Director Margaret Cuthbert, 52; New York Times Editorialist AnneO’Hare McCormick, sixtyish; International Business Machines Vice President Ruth Leach, 29; and New Jersey’s Congresswoman Mary T. Norton, 71.

Dr. Meitner got a silver bowl; the others, engraved citations. Then nine of the eleven sat for a picture as notable for its variety of necklines as for its collection of female talent (see cut).

Helen Traubel, Wagnerian soprano of the Metropolitan Opera, got an operatic assist from Circusman Robert Ringling, who sent her a hand-picked horse to dress up horsy Gotterdammerung. Diva Traubel got the Wagnerian score and the horse together, but the horse just looked baffled (see cut); he didn’t know the score.

Collectors’ Luck

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s stamp collection, appraised at $100,000, was up at auction in Manhattan. About half was sold; it brought $134,550. Curiosa: 52 “Brickbat & Bouquet” covers. Philatelist Roosevelt had happily kept envelopes addressed to “Dishonorable Franklin Deficit Roosevelt,” “Plutocrat F. D. Roosevelt, Owner of 4 Estates, Member of 13 Clubs, White House,” “The Sit-Down Politician,” “White Father of the Pretty Bubbles.” A Manhattan department store bid in the lot for $525.

Sacred & Profane

Harry S. Truman, only recently elected to the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, Inc., ‘was made an honorary member of the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York.

Sir Stafford Cripps, rigidly respectable president of Britain’s Board of Trade, who looks like a cross between Woodrow Wilson and an old maid, plumped for more public aid to private romance. “Love in a cottage is all very well,” he observed, “if the roof doesn’t leak.” Mere muddling-through in marriage, said he, is the result of unlettered prudery. “We have been half-ashamed of our divinely created animal instincts.”

Harold Laski, British Labor’s international problem child, got hit by another spitball, but went right on reciting. Conservative M.P. Cyril Osborne urged Parliament to send beefy Ernest Bevin to the U.S. to offset waspish Laski’s influence. Declared Osborne: let the Government “keep some of their wandering minstrels from the London School of Economics at home.” Minstrel Laski’s proposal of the week: let the U.S. relax international tension right now by destroying its atomic bomb stockpile.

William Saroyan, once U.S. letters’ Public Show-off No. 1, had become a Garbo for privacy. Since release from the Army last September he had cut nary a public caper—not even last January 11 when Wife Carol bore him their unpublicized second child, first daughter.