People: People, Jul. 28, 1947

Back of Beyond

William Randolph Hearst’s personal shopping list was glommed some years ago by a literary visitor, and the gossip finally reached the Saturday Review of Literature. The list read: “1 pair shoelaces, 1 croup kettle, 2 hippopotami. . . .”

Mary Pickford was sued by Director Gregory La Cava for exactly $1,653,750. After “temperament clashes,” Mary had broken their oral contract to film Broadway’s One Touch of Venus, Gregory said, and sighed: “I’m rather impractical about these things.”

Doc Blanchard & Glenn Davis, the touchdown twins, doing time on the Great Rock Candy Pile, where they are making a movie for Paramount, had one of those prison-type pictures made. They will soon have to give up sweets, though, to play with the Eastern College All-Stars against the professional New York Giants.

Larry Crosby, Bing’s inventor brother, announced that he had built a mousetrap that was apparently no better (see cut). “I’ve had the thing for years,” he confessed, “and I haven’t even had a nibble, not even from a mouse.”

Catch as Catch Can

A bull caught up with Manolete (Manuel Rodríguez), Spain’s No. 1 matador (TIME, July 21), at a benefit performance. His horn bit three inches into Manolete’s calf, “destroying a muscle,” the doctors said. But the great man stayed right in there until he had dispatched the beast, whose ears, as a token of popular esteem, were presented to him in the infirmary.

The law caught up with Tyrus R. (“Ty”)Cobb. High in California’s Sierra, the 60-year-old Georgia Peach was driving with his onetime housekeeper, 38-year-old Lucille La Pointe. When she was nabbed for a traffic violation, Cobb started riding the justice of the peace from the sidelines. The justice blew up, jailed Cobb for “being drunk on the public highway,” later released him on $25 bail.

Ed (“Strangler”) Lewis was caught in a metaphysical headlock. The 59-year-old wrestling champ of the ’20s and early ’30s, down 50 pounds to a lean, keen 275, was roaring simultaneously through his resuscitated mat career (his $10 million earnings had all gone, somehow) and a series of lectures on “the constructive way of living.” To the Santa Barbara (Calif.) Lions Club Strangler revealed: “Mental hygiene is the coming thing. . . . We can’t reach a peaceful world if we instill the will to fight in our youngsters.” But then, “by overcoming one obstacle, one gains strength and power to go on to another.”

The Strenuous Life

General Douglas MacArthur, who has spent about a third of his 67 years outside the U.S., let fall that when he retires in about 18 months he expects to live in Milwaukee, his boyhood home. “After all,” said the General’s lady, “we are Americans.”

Manhattan Engine Companies 8, 21, 54 and 65, plus Hook & Ladder Companies 2 and 4, gave tongue and sped through the night to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Firemen swarmed up to a fourth-story bedroom in the Rectory. Cardinal Spellman met them at the door with a big smile and the news that he had already put out the fire (in his bedroom air-conditioning system) with his little 2½-gallon extinguisher. “Why, I am a fireman,” said the Cardinal, proudly displaying a badge of honorary membership in the Boston Fire Department. Then he handed out bronze medals engraved with his portrait and showed the men out.

Four months after Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen delivered a sermon on psychoanalysis, the news slipped out that Roman Catholic Dr. Frank J. Curran had resigned in protest as chief psychiatrist of Manhattan’s St. Vincent’s Hospital. Dr. Curran explained that he had vainly sought a clarification from Monsignor Sheen. Cardinal Spellman’s office promptly announced that “Dr. Curran’s services are not required in any institution of the Archdiocese of New York. However, he will not be refused admittance as a patient. . . .” And Monsignor Sheen made a lengthy statement to the press: there had been “grave distortion” of his meaning; he had not attacked psychiatry, “a perfectly valid science,” nor “psychoanalysis in general”; he had attacked Freudianism, “and this only to the extent that it denies sin, and would supplant confession.”

Sharman Douglas, 19, pretty and having the time of her life as daughter of the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, cut a dainty diplomatic dido by feeding a hungry naturalized Briton—”Flag,” the fawn star of The Yearling, which had been presented to a London zoo.

Conservative Beverley Baxter, M.P., theater critic (for London’s Evening Standard) and minor-league wit, advised the British Catering Association not to serve ice water* to American tourists. Said he: “Ice water . . . ruins the digestion. . . . Let us civilize the Americans when they come.”

O World, O Time

History, a clever hand at shuffleboard, last week had bunched half the crowned exiles of Europe in Alexandria. Egypt’s King Farouk gave a tea party for Bulgaria’s King Simeon II and Queen Mother Giovanna; Russia’s Prince Nicholas and Prince Dmitri Romanov; Albania’s King Zog, Queen Geraldine, and his son, Prince Skander. There was a bad moment when Zog and Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III met. But their former subjects had ceased hostilities; they shook hands. After tea, the party motored along the Mediterranean, but Europe was beyond the horizon.

Queen Victoria would not have been amused. Her sightly granddaughter, Lady Iris Mountbatten, was pinched in Manhattan for passing bum checks ($185.05) to a Washington dress shop. Hauled into night court, she huffed: “[In England] it’s common practice to be overdrawn. . . . The bank notifies you and you cover the overdraft, all in good taste.” Lady Iris covered and the dress shop dropped charges. But all the exciting publicity (which is now Lady Iris’ business for Columbia Pictures Corp.) had excited the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization. They found that Lady Iris had overstayed her visitor’s permit, gave her until Sept. 1 to get out of the country.

* Britons call it “iced water”; Civilizer Baxter was born in Toronto Canada.