People, Oct. 12, 1953

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

In Tokyo, General Mark Clark, completing 17 months as commander of American and U.N. forces in the Far East, went down to the airport to greet his successor, General John E. Hull, and gave him an enthusiastic welcome: “Boy, am I glad to see you!” Next day, the generals set off on a two-day inspection tour of South Korea, where President Syngman Rhee presented Clark with the Taeguk Order, South Korea’s highest military award, for “eminently meritorious conduct” in the Korean war. Before flying home to the U.S., Clark was asked about rumors that he might become a candidate for mayor of San Francisco in 1955. Said he: “I have no political ambitions for at least two or three months. I merely intend to spend some very pleasant time resting in that city.”

Germany’s Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, 77, finishing up a 16-day vacation (“It was very nice, but too short”) at the Black Forest resort of Buehlerhöhe, got an enthusiastic send-off from the chief local physician, who praised his “superlative constitution and distinguished heart.”

After almost a half century on the boards, oldtime Showgirl Sophie Tucker finally got to play Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria. The occasion was the biggest one-night stand of her career: the Sophie Tucker Golden Jubilee Testimonial. Driving up to the front door in a gilded 1903 Ford and rolling-into the Grand Ballroom like a great float (a 24-carat cloth-of-gold gown, a Mr. John hat with diamonds and foot-high white aigrettes, a white mink coat), Sophie sat down to a filet mignon dinner with some 1,700 admirers, who paid their way in with $165,000 for theatrical charities. It was really Sophie’s 49th year in show business, but, as she happily explained in her rain-barrel bass: “Honey, I’m all booked up next year; there wouldn’t have been time then.” The air was damp with sentiment as a succession of old friends and fans, e.g., General James Van Fleet, Ralph Bunche, Tallulah Bankhead, George Jessel, Millon

Berle, Betty Mutton, Edward G. Robinson, Jane Froman, Joe E. Lewis, got up to reminisce about buxom Sophie Abuza of Hartford, Conn., who became Sophie Tucker and made the long haul from singing in the ginmills to the Ziegfeld Follies and the big time. Now pushing 70 and white-thatched, “The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas” will soon open a four-week stint at Manhattan’s Latin Quarter. Said she, dabbing her eyes: “Some of the showmen who were around when I began, they’re still around, dearie, but very few of the women are around.” Sophie shook her head: “I stood up, I stood up.”

Eight months after abandoning her $3,500-a-week Hollywood job for a Sisters of Charity convent in Kansas, Cinemactress June Haver, 27, flew home to Los Angeles, her attempt to become a nun at an end. Photographers snapped her getting kissed by her stepfather and mother, Mr. & Mrs. Andrew Ottestad. Ill health was June’s reason for returning to secular life: “I was a novice, and it means just that. It’s a time of trial, and if you can’t do it, well, you can’t.”

Looking cold, wet and royally uncomfortable, Queen Juliana of The Netherlands was photographed wading about Schouwen island, which has been covered by flood waters since the breaching of the dikes in last winter’s gales.

On the little island of San Giovanni in Lake Maggiore, Italy, where he has been reading the Bible and Dante, listening to records and taking motorboat rides. Old Maestro Arturo Toscanini, 86, told visitors that his next U.S. concert season (beginning Nov. 7 in Carnegie Hall) would be his last. “When I come back here in April,” he said, “I want to stay put.”

Soprano Margaret Truman, soon to start a twelve-concert tour (Montreal to Honolulu) before resuming her television chores in December, counted herself out as a nightclub performer: “Two shows a night, plus singing in all that smoke and noise—that’s the hardest way I know to make a living.”

A picket line set up by A.F.L. Theater Managers and Agents marched in front of the Lyric Theater in Baltimore when Spanish Dancer José Greco and his troupe came to town. The charge: Greco was touring without the aid of a pressagent. Although the public ignored the pickets, and the fuss got good publicity, Greco gave in, hired a pressagent before moving on to Washington.

Hollywood’s strong, silent actor Alan (Shane) Ladd, off to Spain to make a picture, boarded the Queen Elizabeth in a wheelchair after telling how he had come to break his ankle: while romping with his six-year-old son in an Ottawa hotel room, things got a mite too playful, and he tripped over a chair.