• U.S.

People, Dec. 17, 1956

6 minute read
TIME

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

Chicago Lawyer Adlai E. Stevenson, twice-landslided Democratic candidate for the White House, now serving on his party’s national advisory committee, announced: “I will not run again for the presidency . . . But my interest in the Democratic Party . . . will continue un-diminished.”

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A zany who enjoys pricking the conscience of all associated with TV or radio, Comic Henry Morgan began stabbing (on NBC’s Monitor) at those innocent bystanders known as critics. Said Morgan: “A Broadway critic who reviews a TV play that was expanded for the stage always says, ‘This offering was too slight to be expanded.’ A TV critic discussing a Broadway play adapted to television always says, ‘This offering was too big to be cut down for TV.’ ”

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Tootling into Thailand to liven up the U.S. exhibit at an international fair, Bandleader Benny Goodman and his 14 musicians were soon summoned to Bangkok’s royal palace for a command performance. For an hour, as King Phumiphon, 29, himself both a jazzy hornblower and composer (Blue Night), and Queen Sirikit tapped in tempo, Goodman and his men swung out such tunes as On the Sunny Side of the Street and a royalty-requested Lazy River. The King then gave each member of Goodman & Co. a crested silver cigarette case, was in turn presented with a handsome clarinet. That was enough to kick off a jam session lasting another hour, with Phumiphon, joined by some of his own royal band, switching between his brand-new clarinet and his trustier saxophone. After the last note had shaken the palace, Goodman allowed: “He’s not bad at all—not at all!”

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When Britain’s stringy-maned lion of letters, brash Author Colin Wilson, 25, published his 288-page tract, The Outsider (TIME, July 2)—a widely hailed diagnosis of civilization’s sickness and a prescription of a new religion to cure it—few had ever heard of him. But Britons have been nearly deafened ever since by Wilson’s roaring. Aping the brusque hyperboles of one of his few idols, George Bernard Shaw, Wilson has gone about insulting both hosts and lecture audiences, damning society for its regressive complacency, whimsically denigrating Shakespeare (“a great poet with the mentality of a female novelist”). Last week self-educated Outsider Wilson tried a new routine by viciously assailing himself. His confession: “I wrote The Outsider with completely false intent. . . It is just a fraud. I dashed it off in three months and hoped that it looked erudite—and I expect to spend the rest of my life living it down!” What did that make Defrauder Wilson? “A poet, not a philosopher.”

Lady Caccia, smartly tailored wife of Britain’s new envoy to the U.S., met capital newshens over tea”, crisply ticked off her first impressions of the U.S. Was she having tough sledding because of present tensions between Britain and the U.S.? Replied she: “I don’t find between women any breach to be healed.” On Washington: “Much like Paris, not too different from Vienna.” On Manhattan’s lack of “dream department stores”: “The shops there are so much more like European shops than I had expected. They are cozy and untidy, and even deal in antiques.” Having heard that U.S. life was a mad merry-go-round, Lady Caccia was agreeably surprised: “I don’t find it so.”*

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United Mine Workers’ aging (76) Boss John L. Lewis has generally decried,as the Devil’s work, employers’ injunctions to stop picketing. Picket Patriarch Lewis, however, had a familiar hot potato tossed into his own hands last week. At several Atlantic coast ports, in a jurisdictional row, pickets from A.F.L.-C.I.O. unions challenged access to some half-dozen Liberty ships owned by American Coal Shipping, Inc. A part owner of A.C.S.: United Mine Workers. At week’s end the pickets in Charleston, S.C. were gone, shooed away by court injunctions obtained while Employer Lewis sat by—unprotestingly, at the very least.

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To a Washington audience that came to be enjoyably affronted by his lecture on “The Audience in Decadence,” Composer Gian Carlo Menotti strummed a plain-spoken variation on one of his favorite themes. “It’s not the taste of the modern audience which I think decadent.” he declaimed, “but rather its character and individuality.” The dogmatic tastes of today’s audiences are rooted in their esthetic laziness. “I’d much rather sit at dinner next to one of those old ladies who tell you, ‘Picasso is a fraud and Stravinsky a bore,’ than beside one of those young things who rave about their Klee paintings and their Bartok quartets . . . Today Brahms can no longer be tolerated, but Rossini is very chic.”

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Across the snow-swept plains of below-zero Alberta, a grain farmer drove 75 miles to Calgary to place an overseas telephone call to Budapest. At the expense of the Calgary Herald, Mike Kadar, 47, an immigrant from Hungary 28 years ago, sought to talk, brother to brother, to none other than Janos Kadar, No. 1 stooge of the Soviet puppet regime in Hungary. He had small hopes of shoring up younger brother Janos’ spine, but other Hungarian-Canadians had besought Mike Kadar to try to intercede in behalf of their valiant relatives still writhing under Russian guns in Hungary (see FOREIGN NEWS). After a futile 24-hour vigil near the telephone, Mike Kadar gave up and journeyed home to write a pleading letter to Janos. The harsh odds, however, were that Mike had already got his answer ten years ago. At that time Janos Kadar, then a rising star in Hungary’s Little Bear constellation, had written to Mike, asking him to send no more parcels or letters. And, perhaps dimly perceiving the days of terror to come. Communist Kadar had also advised Farmer Kadar to stay in Canada because he and his family would be “much safer.”

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Britain’s enterprising Duke of Bedford, 39, who opens his woodsy estate of Woburn Abbey to tourists each Sunday at 35¢ a head, wrote a letter to London’s Sunday Pictorial suggesting that the World Congress of Nudists foregather in 1958 around his 90-room home and frolic on his 3,000 acres. He would not, he said, hike his sightseer fee by so much as a ha’penny. Proclaimed he: “Our policy is better entertainments and attractions for our visitors each year.”

*Disagreeably unsurprised, strong-nerved Soviet Foreign Minister Dmitry Shepilov groused in Moscow last week: “You need strong nerves to live in New York!”

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