People: The Wagging Tongue

In Edinburgh to conduct at the annual music festival, peppery old (70) Sir Thomas Beecham struck a sonorous chord: “It is an honor and a privilege for the festival for me to come.” But when someone mentioned the Festival of Britain, planned for 1951 as a mammoth cultural fair, he sounded a brassy note: “A monumental piece of imbecility and iniquity…We are going to celebrate 50 years of the most abominable misgovernment by having an exhibition and festival at the expense of U.S. money…We are broke—underline that three times. The country has gone potty. We have no moral sense left. I haven’t much myself.”

For 1,000 music teachers meeting in San Francisco, Music Critic Virgil Thomson had a confession: “Criticism [of young performers] has an influence far beyond what seems to me right or justified, and management depends on us [critics] more than we wish to be depended on.”

Back in the U.S. after three months in Europe as a self-styled “celluloid diplomat,” Actor Clifton (“Belvedere”) Webb filed a tart report: “From what I have seen, the only country in the world today that is safe from Communism is Russia.”

As guest columnist in the Houston Press, Oilman-Hotelman Glenn McCarthy raked up some 25 McCarthy rumors and denied them all. Insisted McCarthy: there is no feud between him and fellow Texan Jesse Jones; there is no such thing as a minimum tip at his Shamrock hotel; he is not trying to buy a newspaper, a movie studio, Catalina Island or the St. Louis Browns.

With only three years to go until the next presidential nominating conventions, Columbia University’s Dwight D. Eisenhower began deftly sidestepping newsmen’s questions as to whether he would be a candidate. Said the general: “I’m not going to go around thumping my chest and telling every newspaperman that I won’t be President of the United States. That would be silly.”