People: May 1, 1964

Down in Washington, D.C., four-times-married (and divorced) Mrs. Louise Cromwell Brooks MacArthur Atwill Heiberg, 67, was writing her memoirs and saying a few advance words about her second husband. She became Douglas MacArthur’s first wife in 1922, said the New York-born socialite, over the objections of General John (“Black Jack”) Pershing, who was also courting her. “Pershing told me if I married MacArthur he would send him to the Philippines.” But she did not divorce the general eight years later because she hated the islands, as has been reported. “It was an interfering mother-in-law.” There is more, too, she promises, including love letters from Pershing and MacArthur. “Remember the old saying,” she smiles sweetly. “A man can never be a hero to his wife or his valet.”

Last job held: M.P. and War Minister. Reason for leaving: caught out in lie which opened question to whole moral character. With a resume like that a man might as well forget it, but John Profumo, 49, last week started in as a nonsalaried assistant to the warden of Toynbee Hall, a London settlement house. Explained the newborn social worker: “Believe me, this is no stunt. I want to forget the past.”

The first thing to remember is that Horace Dodge is dead. That won’t change. As for the rest of it, who knows? Just before the auto heir died last December, he was divorcing his wife, but luckily for her he didn’t make it in time, and Gregg Sherwood Dodge, fortyish, became his widow instead. She thought that meant she was in line for his $2,500,000 estate. Only he had too many debtors. So Gregg decided to sue not only his estate but also his mother (who’s worth $65,000,000) for trying to break up the marriage. Now Gregg is happy to announce that her $11,000,000 worth of suits have been settled for “$9,000,000, free and clear.” And that’s that—except that her mother-in-law’s attorney insists that the settlement is “considerably less than $9,000,000.”

As the special train rattled toward Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., that day in 1946, Britain’s wartime Prime Minister and the President of the U.S. indulged in a little poker. The U.S. got taken to the cleaners, as Harry Truman, 80 next week, recalled the incident. Truman marveled that during the ride Winston Churchill, now 89, had also managed to work on “one of the finest speeches ever made in the world.” To honor the author of the famed “Iron Curtain” speech, Truman was again at Westminster last week for the groundbreaking of a Churchill Memorial project that will transplant a bombed-out London church to the Missouri campus.

Redesigned by Sir Christopher Wren in 1677 after the Great Fire of London, the church will be moved stone by stone and completely reconstructed at a cost of $1,500,000.

“I do not know of any more dedicated anti-Communist than Robert Welch,” wrote Boston’s Richard Cardinal Cushing. “I unhesitatingly endorse his John Birch Society.” That was in 1960. But times have changed—or so it seemed for a while last week. When he was told that two Birchers had gone on a New York radio program and inferred that he agreed with the tenet that Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy were Communists, the cardinal denied any such thing. “This retraction is long overdue,” he announced. “I do not consider this society as an effective way of confronting the international conspiracy of Communism.” What particularly galled the cardinal was calling “my nearest and dearest friend, the late John F. Kennedy, a Communist.” That, as it turned out, was something the Birchers had not done, and Gushing retracted again. Said he: “Because of my own dedication to the fight, I certainly do not want to do any harm to fellow battlers.”

Writing, says David Cornwell, 32, who authored The Spy Who Came in from the Cold under the pen name of John Le Carré, “is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.” For all that, Cornwell-Le Carré has seen too many mud pies that are the only pies some people have. And to combat such poverty, he proposes “a scheme called ‘Write for Life.’ ” The idea is to get well-known writers to donate their royalties from a specific new book to a fund that will help worthy charities around the world. “Just at the moment when my market price seems to be so high,” he explains, “it’s paradoxical to be living alongside such wretched privation.”

From the first heartthrob, it’s been a mess, but this week the issue will be settled. The Netherlands’ Princess Irene, 24, will marry her Spaniard, Prince Carlos de Borbón y Parma, 34, “in Rome on neutral territory, thus avoiding any accusations of political intention.” Irene’s mother, Queen Juliana, nonetheless announced that neither she nor any of the royal family would attend the wedding for fear of lending impetus to Carlos’ bid for the currently nonexistent Spanish throne. Nothing daunted, Carlos’ family moved the ceremony from a chapel to a larger church to accommodate an expected 500 guests. But it looked like the royal top shots, including his uncle, Prince Felix, husband of Luxembourg’s Grand Duchess, would be staying away.