People, Jul. 19, 1954

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

Landing in Manhattan after a seven-month European concert tour, Peru’s multi-octaved Singer Yma Sumac, with her son Charles, 5, in tow, bumped smack into immigration officials who detained her at the pier for an hour, then confined her to the New York City area pending a hearing this week. In tearful confusion, Yma wailed: “I didn’t kill. I didn’t rob. I didn’t nothing. What?” Yma and her husband, Peruvian Composer Moises Vivanco (similarly treated when he returned to the U.S. last month), blamed the “professional jealousy” of Yma’s rival warblers for hanging “some question of subversion” over both their heads. The immigration officials kept their silence.

In Denver on his first extended tour of the West, vacationing Student Arthur MacArthur, 16, son of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, was cornered by newsmen at a hotel, promptly showed an inherited talent for maneuver. Photographers slyly tried to get the lad to pose directly before several framed pictures of President Dwight Eisenhower. But young MacArthur was aware of his unguarded rear. “Oh no,” he announced firmly. “My father doesn’t want me to pose for pictures like that. He. told me: no political pictures.” Then he faded away from the vulnerable sector.

Dashing Cinemactor Errol (Against All Flags) Flynn, 44, a well-docketed veteran of legal brawls (two divorce suits, one trial and one accusation of statutory rape), was all tangled up with another lady, though this matter had nothing to do with romance. The plaintiff: his former London landlady, winner of a court order requiring Flynn to cough up $128.80. This, she charged, was the amount she anted up to pay his unpaid bills after he moved out like Flynn. When he got the bad word, Flynn gave a defiant performance. “I shall not pay!” cried he. “I will defend this to the end [even though] it may cost me ten times as much as paying off—or 100 times . . . I’m mad . . . I’ll fight to the death—even if I have to fly back here [i.e., London] from California.” Harry Truman, after 19 days in the Kansas City Hospital, where he had survived a major operation and a dangerous infection (TIME. June 28 et seq.), checked out at 5:30 one morning, drove home to a quiet breakfast on the screened porch.

Austria’s Prince Ernst RÜudiger von Starhemberg, 55, whose fascist bullyboys and Heimwehr provided a home-front imitation of Naziism until the real thing seized Austria in 1938, got more strange forgiveness for his past troublemaking: Austria’s highest court handed back to him his 82 castles, estates and mansions, all of which were originally confiscated by the Nazis when they took over and remained in public custody at war’s end.

Since 1943, Von Starhemberg has been holed up in Argentina—but for little good reason of late. Another Austrian court last year ruled that there were no grounds for trying him on charges of high treason.

Word sifted through the Bamboo Curtain that France’s General Christian de Castries, gallant loser of the siege of Dienbienphu, was being “well treated” in a Viet Minh prison camp.

In an idyllic vignette on the Nevada shore of Lake Tahoe, Cinemactress Ava Gardner, 31, awaiting a Reno divorce from Cinemactor-Crooner Frank Sinatra, held hands with a dark, handsome fellow and waved happily at two fishermen who chugged past in a small boat. Ava’s escort: the man who tried to teach her how to subdue bulls as she subdues men in the movies, Spanish Matador Luis Miguel Domingum, 28. What Ava didn’t know might have hurt her: the fishermen were actually private detectives, working for an unidentified client whom they presumed to be “a rich man.” Their orders: “Check on Dominguin’s every move—even follow him to Manila.” As Evangelist Billy Graham—met at the ship by his wife Ruth and three daughters—landed in the U.S. after his phenomenally successful five-month swing through Western Europe. Czech Communists suddenly perceived the sinister anti-Communist purpose behind Billy’s salvation tour. Their ingenious conclusion, as blared forth by Radio Prague: “The team which he is carrying with him [through West Germany] is suspiciously little concerned with the beautiful hymns and concluding prayer, but is diligently collecting [name and address] cards in order to maintain future contact and to send material.” At week’s end, back home in North Carolina, Graham found something more serious to worry about: doctors told him he had a kidney stone, which may soon be diligently collected by surgeons.

Excused from duty at New Jersey’s Camp Kilmer while he was neck-deep in the Army-McCarthy hearings, National Guard Lieut. Roy M. Cohn got orders to report in September for training at Mississippi’s Keesler Air Force Base.

Having settled down to the good expatriate life in Paris, veteran Movie Director-Playwright Preston (Strictly Dishonorable}) Sturges, 55, figured the time was proper to burn behind him all bridges leading back to Hollywood. His holocaust blazed merrily in the columns of France’s weekly Arts Magazine. “We must never forget that the cinema is an art,” warned he. “But it is an art so much more costly than the others . . . that the artist must tie himself to the businessman … In that lies all the drama—rather the comic opera—of Hollywood: a group of fat businessmen—good fathers, not very funny, who amuse themselves, big cigars in hand, discussing stock-exchange quotations, the percentage of returns on their stocks, world tendencies . . . condemned to conjugal existence with this heap of drunkards, madmen, divorcees, sloths, epileptics, morphinomaniacs and assorted bastards, who are, in the considered opinion of the management, artists.”