People, may 17, 1954

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

None of Asbestos Heir Tommy Manville’s first eight wives ever succeeded in smoking him out into court to fight a divorce brawl. Playboy Manville, 60, in escaping his previous marriages, barely dented his $20 million mad money. But shrewd Anita Roddy-Eden Manville, No. 9, enticed Tommy into a Manhattan court last week. Anita, 31, wanted a fatter payoff in her separation agreement: $1,250 a week instead of the piddling $1,000 a month she gets. When their honeymoon was only two days old, Anita testified, teetering Tommy lugged out photographs of all his ex-wives and old flames and hung them all about the house. “I said to him, ‘Tommy, you’ve had more than your usual quota of gin this morning.’ ” That got Tommy’s dander up. “He got his gun and threatened to kill me.” In the witness chair, Manville was asked if it was true that he had proposed to Anita’s twin sister, Juanita Patino, ex-wife of Bolivia’s tin tycoon, just a few days after he married Anita. Tommy grinned sheepishly: “I don’t know. I propose to anybody. I say it to a hatcheck girl. I say it to anybody—sort of as a form of introduction.” At week’s end, when the judge tossed her suit out of court. Anita announced that she would appeal But there would be no divorce Anita reflected upon Tommy’s worldly goods and the 29-year difference in their ages, then candidly charted her course: “I am still his wife, and I am going to be the Widow Manville.”

It began to look as if William Z. Foster, 73, ailing high commissar of the U.S. Communist Party, might beat a conspiracy rap and thus never join his eleven former aides-de-camp behind bars. In Manhattan, a court-appointed doctor examined Foster, who was indicted with the others in 1948, and reported that he is still too ill to stand trial.

By unanimous vote of the Beverly Hills, Calif. city council, retired Lieut. General Harold L. George, 60, boss of the Army Air Force’s globe-covering Air Transport Command in World War II and now a director of a Los Angeles electronics firm, was elected mayor for a one-year term.

At Hollywood’s Mocambo nightclub, up & coming Cinemactress Grace (Mogambo) Kelly, 24, turned up for dinner as the date of mellowing (52) Crooner Bing Crosby, who bridled painfully when a photographer caught him dancing without the hair piece he usually wears before the cameras.

Tailor and Cutter, the trade magazine that acts as the sartorial conscience of well-dressed Englishmen, sent its man to survey fashions displayed in works hung at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition of contemporary paintings. To his dismay. Tailor’s critic discovered that, clearly, the best-dressed man “hanging on the wall at Burlington House” was pinstriped Winthrop W. Aldrich, U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, whose likeness in Savile Row finery was painted by famed British Portraitist James Gunn (TIME, May 10). Said Tailor: “If we reflect that our British reputation for fine clothes owes a great deal to a natural talent for wearing them properly, this being outworn by a foreigner has a significance to sober the apathetic.”

At a luncheon given by Chicago Tribune Publisher Robert R. (“Bertie”) McCormick, a new group, firm in their old belief that foreign entanglements are dangerous, banded themselves into “For America,” an outfit which will “combat super-internationalism, one-worldism and Communism in America.” Cochairmen: General Robert E. Wood, retired board chairman of Sears, Roebuck & Co. and onetime head of America First; Clarence E. Manion, ex-dean of Notre Dame’s law school, whose resignation as chairman of the President’s Commission on Intergovernmental Relations was forced after he began ballyhooing the Bricker Amendment (TIME, Feb. 8). Among other For Americans: Montana’s onetime (1923-47) Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Author John T. (The Road Ahead) Flynn, New York’s longtime (1919-45) Republican Representative Hamilton Fish.

Mirroring the ancestral profile, Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 60, posed proudly for a picture with a bust of her father, Theodore Roosevelt, after its formal unveiling at the Hall of Fame on the greening campus of New York University.

In a strangely benign twist to the current uncompromising Soviet line, Russia’s top World War II military hero, Marshal Georgy K. Zhukov, in a Pravda article, indulged himself in praise for two former comrades in arms. Wrote Zhukov, in marking the ninth anniversary of V-E day: “The Soviet people will never forget the selfless struggle waged against the German armed forces by our Allies. We pay our due also to their leaders. General of the Army Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery, under whose leadership American and British armed forces repeatedly defeated German fascist troops.” Later in his piece, however, Zhukov got back into step. Sample: “The foreign policy and war strategy of U.S. . imperialism are being built on the use of the peoples and territories of other countries for their predatory aims.”