People, May 13, 1940

Informed that H. L. Mencken has a name for strip-tease artists (TIME, April 29), Teaseuse Gypsy Rose Lee ejaculated: “Ecdysiast he calls me! Why, the man is an intellectual slob. He has been reading books.”

Moon-faced David Rockefeller, 24, youngest son of John D. Rockefeller Jr., after working for a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, got himself an unpaid job in New York City’s Government (one of 60 students of government who got similar jobs as “interns”). Said amazed new Intern Rockefeller: “I never saw anything like the Mayor.”

In the game of power politics nations sometimes resort to intrigue, sometimes to threats, sometimes to propaganda and showmanship. Playing the game, Japan and Sweden both sent photographs to the U. S. last week. Japan’s contribution: a picture of Crown Prince Akihito, 6, traipsing off to the Peers’ School, wearing his navy blue uniform and a cap with brass cherry blossoms, carrying the grandson of Heaven’s schoolbooks. Sweden’s contribution: a picture of Swedish Princesses Désirée, Margaretha, and Birgitta (daughters of Prince Gustaf Adolf, granddaughters of Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf, great-granddaughters of King Gustaf), chirping merrily at a tea party, blissfully untroubled by Adolf Hitler or his threat to Sweden.

Heredity told in Wellesley’s annual hoop-rolling race (traditionally the winner is supposed to be first of her class to be married). It was won by lanky, pretty Martha Attridge, 20, whose mother captured the prize in 1907, and married (after nine years) the Rev. Thomas W. Attridge, onetime Princeton miler.

Playwright Noel Coward, visiting the U. S. for the first time since the war began, divulged his formula for enduring during air raids: “When the warning sounds I gather up some pillows, a pack of cards and a bottle of gin, tuck myself beneath the stairs and do very nicely with the consolations of a drink and solitaire until ‘All Clear’ sounds.”

His mind on the two most exciting spring games (baseball and politics), Prairie Editor William Allen White, Republican, turned to Democrat Eleanor Roosevelt during a dinner in her honor, declared: “My dear, I don’t care if he runs for the third or fourth term so long as he lets you run the bases. . . .”

Pulitzer Prizes for 1940 were awarded to: Dirt-Novelist John Steinbeck for his Okie novel, The Grapes of Wrath; Playwright William Saroyan (who said he didn’t want the prize) for The Time of Your Life, which last week also captured the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award; Historian Carl Sandburg, for Abraham Lincoln: The War Years; Biographer Ray Stannard Baker, for Woodrow Wilson—Life and Letters (Vols. 7, 8); Poet Mark Van Doren, for Collected Poems; Correspondent Otto D. Tolischus, for his dispatches to the New York Times from Berlin.* Other journalism citations: Baltimore Sun Cartoonist Edmund Duffy, New York World Telegram Reporter S. Burton Heath, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial-writer Bart Howard.

Flying to a smoker at Cambridge, Mass, for Harvard students, Jack Benny’s drawling stooge Rochester (Negro Eddie Anderson) was persuaded to leave his plane at Providence, R. I. by a delegation of students who drove him lickety-split to a D. K. E. smoker at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Informed, 200 Harvard students rioted riotously. Uninformed, Rochester thought he was at Harvard until two hours later he discovered the awful truth.

Census takers in Pittsburgh revealed that they had not completely succeeded in cataloguing Helen Clay Frick, 49, spinster daughter of the late Steel and Coke Tycoon Henry Clay Frick. Said she: “I am a Republican and a good American citizen. I don’t object to the census. I answered every question except those which were not proper. They asked the value of my Pittsburgh home. That is a personal question. . . . They asked my education. That is a personal matter, it is none of their business.”

On his return to Paris after a six-week “study tour” of American democracy, Archduke Otto, Habsburg pretender to the throne of Austria, was asked what he thought of the U. S. Presidential campaign. Observed Otto: “No petty wrangling, and no personal rivalries. The national interest dominates all.”

*Mr. Tolischus’ work sufficed to win him not only a Pulitzer Prize but enforced rustication from Germany. Long under fire from Nazis, he went to Stockholm. Last week he was given eight days to wind up his Berlin affairs.