People, Feb. 24, 1958

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

Wanting to celebrate his 38th birthday by getting away from it all, Egypt’s blimp-sized ex-King Farouk put on his sunglasses, boarded a 22-seat bus and rolled through the Alps into the tiny principality of Liechtenstein. His fellow riders: his 19-year-old daughter Princess Ferial, two bodyguards, a chauffeur, a maid and an anonymous raven-tressed playmate. Explained His Corpulent Majesty: “People think I and my entourage are an ordinary tourist party.”

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At a banquet for Britain’s M.P.s in the House of Commons dining hall, London’s top-ranking master barber (the guild boss of hairdressers, perfumers and wigmakers) laid all about him with cutting comments on the hair styles of leading politicians, who often look, cried he, “like corn crakes [a short-billed rail] in a gale!” Of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (see FOREIGN NEWS): “He ruins the whole effect by wings of hair sticking out on either side of his face and by a mustache that one would hardly call elegant.” Of Laborites Hugh Gaitskell and Aneurin Bevan: “Quite content to be permanently untidy about the ears.”

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On a long foray into Yankee territory to make friends and whoop up “Mississippi Recognition Month,” that state’s personable Democratic Governor James Plemon Coleman (TIME, March 4. 1957) stopped off in Manhattan to honor nine Mississippians who have made good north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Among the former Magnolia Staters appointed honorary colonels and aides-de-camp to Coleman’s staff: the New York Times’s Managing Editor Turner Catledge, Musicomedy Director (Jamaica) and Composer Lehman Engel, and the littlest colonel, ten-year-old Eddie Hodges, carrot-topped standout in the new Broadway hit musical The Music Man.

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Ticklish Volume 40 of the new edition of the Big Soviet Encyclopedia, the volume containing the latest box score on Joseph Stalin, was published almost two years behind schedule and in the wake of its 48 companion volumes. Joe’s spotty career is now trimmed down to five pages and one picture—a wholesale pruning in comparison with the previous (1947) edition’s fat 59 pages and 14 pictures. In the new version, Dictator Stalin made no horrible mistakes until 1934, when “he began to believe in his own infallibility” and grew deaf to his comrades’ advice. Among his biggest boners: the purges of the late ’30s, trusting Hitler, feuding with Tito, believing in inevitable war between capitalist and socialist states. “Stalinism” is now officially a tainted word, but that is not Joe’s fault: “The term is an invention of reactionary imperialist circles.”

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India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was doing his utmost to provide fun, games and proper roosts for three foreign birds of altogether different feathers. The New Delhi visitors: U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge, North Viet Nam’s vermicelli-bearded Red Boss Ho Chi Minh, Afghanistan’s King Mohammed Zahir Shah. By all odds, Ho was the corniest good neighbor, kissed every official within reach, made misty-eyed speeches with proletarian humility, begged New Delhi’s schoolchildren to call him chacha (uncle), the same term of endearment they have been taught to call Nehru. Less interested in making loaded impressions, King Zahir, on a 15-day state visit, rushed busily between polo and field-hockey matches, a horse show, small-game shooting, a glider flight. A slated highlight of Zahir’s trip: a tiger hunt, for which his striped target, previously located and fattened on goats and buffalo meat, unwarily awaited the King’s bullet. Alighting at Palam Airport, Cabot Lodge was greeted as a long-lost friend by his oldtime U.N. wrangling foe, V. K. Krishna Menon, now India’s Defense Minister. Asked by a cameraman to keep talking with Menon, Lodge quipped: “Oh, we won’t have any trouble about that!” Cane in one hand, Menon plucked jovially at the garlands around Lodge’s neck, apologized with some relish: “I’m sorry there are bugs in your flowers.”

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A Pan American World Airways plane crash near Lisbon in 1943 all but ended the big-time careers of throaty Singer Jane (With a Song in My Heart) Froman and Accordionist Gypsy Markoff, both bound overseas to entertain troops. It was five years before Jane could walk again without crutches (she still wears an iron brace on one leg). By gritty determination Gypsy made her crippled left hand play an accordion again, never completely regained her former skill. So far, in compensation for physical injuries, each entertainer has collected from Pan Am a piddling $8,300—maximum allowable damages, under a 1929 treaty, for injuries suffered in international flights (unless the claimant proves willful misconduct). The House of Representatives voted last August to award Singer Froman $138,205 and Accordionist Markoff $33,236 for their wartime catastrophes. Last week Gypsy, at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, asked Tennessee’s Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver to raise the amounts; Jane was laid up after her 31stoperation. Said Gypsy to the Keef: “My hand feels like a perpetual toothache.” Observed the Senator: “A very pitiful, appealing situation.”

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In deference to the view of Harry Truman that the Missouri Waltz is “as bad as The Star-Spangled Banner so far as music is concerned,” the Democratic National Committee will omit the Waltz from the program of a fund-raising banquet that Truman is to attend in Washington this week.

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Scheduled to get a shearing as a draftee, Dreamboat Groaner Elvis Presley jumped the clippers by getting a “normal” haircut that shortened his sideburns a good inch, left him still looking much too dreamy for the Army.

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Washington was still recovering from a visitation by Britain’s Virginia-born Lady Astor, 78, whose breezy wit once again ventilated salon, corridor and cloakroom. Reported syndicated Capital Gossipist Betty Beale: “At one gay party [she] came face to face with her old friend Adlai Stevenson, and startled everyone by proposing marriage. ‘You need me,’ she teased. ‘I’m a rich widow.’ Retorted Adlai, I want someone more mature.’ “