People: People, Dec. 2, 1946

The Younger Set

Alvin C. York Jr., mountaineer son of the No. 1 U.S. hero of World War I, got indicted in Tennessee for running contraband liquor.

Randolph Churchill, Winston’s bumptious lecturer-son, got in more trouble with his new Lincoln. Last fortnight a wheel had come off while he was doing 50 in Indiana. This time the trouble was in Connecticut. He got a parking ticket; but that was fixed when it was discovered who he was—a guest of the city of Derby. Then he shot off toward Manhattan. A state trooper, who said it had taken him eight miles to catch up, stopped Randolph outside Westport, pinched him for doing 80. Trial was set for Dec. 9.

Royalty

King Gustav of Sweden was finally through with tennis at 88, on his doctor’s orders. So he went out shooting in a heavy snow, bagged four pheasants. Hunting, said Gustav, was the second best sport—”anyway, better than golf, which is an old man’s game.”

Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark wore a court plaster on his forehead. Returning from a fox hunt, he had driven his car into a truck in the fog.

King Lear had a shiner. Laurence Olivier, set to play the role in Paris this week, got it in a brawl with a minor Old Vic player who had attacked him, declared Olivier’s lawyer, “without any excuse whatever.” Wife Vivien Leigh gave the fellow a queenly belt over the head with a poker.

Movers & Shakers

Men of letters, according to their natures or moods, paid their respects to their fellow beings (and their institutions) in a variety of ways:

The late Herbert George Wells’s will left the bulk of his estate—some $240,000 before taxes—to his two sons, a daughter-in-law, and Baroness Budberg, whom the will described as “my very dear friend.” Father Wells took time out to express his “loving recognition of the good and sane behavior of all my offspring toward me. . . .”

Jacques-of-All-Letters Philippe Soupault, one of the founding fathers of surrealism, examined love-in-the-U.S., shuddered at what he saw, reported in the French review Modern Times that “Americans consider a love affair in the same light as a crime.” The fear of love, he observed, produces nervous disorders, and “there are more maladjusted people in America than in any other country in the world.”

No. 1 Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, whose play, The Respectful Prostitute* was attacked in Paris as anti-American, protested with a reasonableness so sweet that it seemed oldfashioned. He just did not understand, said he, what anti-American meant. “One finds [in the U.S.] ways . . . which are excellent,” he hummed, “and some which are not so good.” (M. Sartre’s No Exit was to open on Broadway this week.)

George Bernard Shaw, as usual, was something else again. His reply to an appeal for aid for an evangelists’ training school was no. His explanation: “Jesus gave the worst possible advice to the young man who had great possessions,* and St. Peter struck a man and his wife dead for a petty anti-communist delinquency,† I cannot endorse such crudities.”

Winners

Last week Mrs. America, an Ohio brunette with four children (TIME, Nov. 25), decided after all to give up the prize money and cross-country whoop-te-do and stay home with the kids. So now Mrs. America was Mrs. Fredda Acker, a South Carolina redhead (with just one child), who had been judged second best. She said she was thrilled.

A less comprehensive title was awarded to Austine Cassini, modish Washington Times-Herald columnist. The title: “Most Magnificent Doll among American Newspaperwomen.” The loot: a silver-plated typewriter. Also a trip to the premiere of a movie titled The Magnificent Doll.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower got a nice title too. A schoolgirls’ club in Boston passed over Frank Sinatra and voted the General “The Most Exciting Man of 1946.” The General’s aide told the girls the General was “flattered indeed.”

The Very Best

It was touch & go. Silver-spoon-fed William Force Dick, half-brother of John Jacob Astor, was out $200-odd. The way the sheriff told it, handsome Sportsman Dick picked up the wrong hitchhikers—three young men who produced a gun, made him drive them all the way from Long Island to Manhattan, took his money and let him go in darkest Harlem.

Peggy Guggenheim, copper-rich patroness of the arts and collector of artists, was out two dreamlike paintings, an abstract sculpture and a utilitarian gewgaw. Incredibly stolen from her art gallery: Flat Landscape and Child of the Mountain by Paul Klee, an untitled chromium relief by Hans Arp, and a fancy bottle top wrought by Author Laurence Vail, her first husband.

Restored to dazzling old Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh, at police headquarters, was the bracelet she had lost on opening night at the opera (TIME, Nov. 25). It was only a $5,000 affair of 140 diamonds and seven emeralds, but she loved it, and to the woman who had found it on the opera-house floor Mrs. Kavanaugh gave $250. While reporters and photographers watched closely, the loser, in a Norwegian fox jacket and pearls, and the finder, in something modest in black, made the trade. The finder, who used to be a cook, guessed she would buy a new coat and a few other things.

Just Folks

Eddie Canton and wife Ida turned out to have overpaid their income taxes in 1945, got back the difference: some $100,000. Bing Crosby, whose golf had been suffering, got a checkup at a hospital, was treated for a stiff elbow. Actor George Sanders took fresh note of the way celebrities got mauled and announced that he would never again give his autograph in public. And PRC Pictures announced that it was bringing Rin Tin Tin back in Vita-color.

Householders

Lost: famed Helen Keller’s rural Connecticut home, by fire. One wall was left standing. Miss Keller was expected back from abroad shortly before Christmas.

Wanted: living quarters in New York by retiring Episcopal Bishop William T. Manning, soon to vacate the spacious, high-ceilinged Bishop’s House of the Diocese, on the cathedral grounds.

Wanted: a home in or near Washington, by Mrs. J. A. Krug, whose husband is not only Secretary of the Interior but Solid Fuels Administrator. The owner of the Krugs’ present home, which has oil heat, wants to get in himself.

Found: a dormitory for Kilroy’s nine children. James J. Kilroy of Halifax, Mass., who says he first wrote “Kilroy was here” on the Lexington’s hull in a shipyard, won a contest for the best explanation of how the Kilroy thing started, received as a reward one streetcar from the Boston Elevated Railway Co. If Kilroy can get it home, that will be the children’s wing.

* On the Paris posters advertising it, the word Putain (Prostitute) was decently blacked out.

* “. . . Sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor. . . .”

† In the early Christian community everything was held in common; but Ananias and Sapphira, who had sold a piece of land, held back some of the money. When Peter took them to task they “fell down and gave up the ghost.”