People: After Due Consideration

In Dallas to lecture at the Woman’s Club, Ogden Nash had a fast answer to comments on his scarlet suspenders:

“Mid Dallas’ Downtown palaces I deprecate my red galluses, But if I swap ’em for a belt My abdomen gets calluses.”

Patched up with 20 plastic-surgery operations after a plane crash last year, Jacqueline Auriol, daughter-in-law of France’s President, announced in Buffalo that she had learned to fly a helicopter—”a more rational plane,” said she, “for a woman pilot.”

It was like winning an Oscar for Cinemactress Claudette Colbert, when a cosmetic company bought her oil portrait of Gloria (Mrs. Jimmy) Stewart to use in its 1951 advertising campaign, and gave her another commission to paint one of Teresa Wright. Painting, Claudette explained, was an old ambition brought to a head three years ago when she read Winston Churchill’s Painting as a Pastime. “I figured if he had time, then I had time,”

Led by active anti-Communist Lord Craigavon, some 1,500 pilgrims from England and the Dominions flocked to Canterbury Cathedral by train, bus and car for a special service. It was time, they felt, to rededicate themselves in a body against the “evil and godless forces of materialism and Communism,” and to pray for delivery “from those false teachers who mislead and confuse the unwary.” Lying abed within the Cathedral shadows, recovering from an illness was Dr. Hewlett (“The Red Dean”) Johnson, who recently returned from the Communist-sponsored Warsaw “World Peace Congress,” at which he was a headline speaker.

For a costume ball in Paris, Viscountess Marie-Laure de Noailles asked guests to come dressed as if they were going to a 1900 frolic at a seaside resort. The result: U.S. Ambassador David Bruce came as a valet de chambre, with Mrs. Bruce turned out as a lady’s maid; Baron Alain de Rothschild played a bearded sea captain; Couturier Jacques Fath slipped into a simple bearskin creation, to match the gypsy getup of his pretty blonde wife, who is his favorite model.

Cinemactress Susan Hayward said she had posed for her last kitchen publicity picture: “Hollywood is not full of stars with dishpan hands. That’s fiddle-faddle. We’re exciting and half screwball. All of us are flamboyant hams.”

Low Bows

To Groucho Marx, named top TV man of the year, went an Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ gold-plated “Emmy,” the equivalent of a movie Oscar.

In Manhattan’s City Center Theater, Actor-Producer Maurice Evans opened a two-week revival of his King Richard II, which first brought him U.S. fame in 1937. Again the critics cheered “one of the distinguished performances of the modern American theater …” However, said Evans, 49, this would probably be his last revival: “I think it ought to be played by an actor of more suitable age. It’s about time I stopped.”

Because of her “outstanding contribution in the field of business,” Atlanta picked Margaret Bryan (Mrs. Clay Evans Joseph), 50, as the city’s Woman of the Year. In the last three decades, Teacher Bryan has guided some 25,000 Atlanta children through dancing class. Her current crop of pupils are grandchildren of her first students, who remember her as Arthur Murray’s exhibition dancing partner and assistant, hired to run his sideline dancing school when he was a student at Georgia Tech.

Tough All Over

Helen Hayes, 50, back in Hollywood after 16 years to play the role of a 50-year-old in a new picture, My Son John, mused: “When I was here before, they assured me that only one side of my face could be photographed, and now any side can be photographed. It’s a cozy feeling. All I have to do now is act.”

In Long Beach, Attorney Rolland Truman gave the graduating class of California College of Medical Technicians a personal estimate of his third cousin: “It would please me a great deal to be able to tell the world that Cousin Harry is doing a grand job in the White House. But you and I know that he isn’t…”

In Boston, oldtime Crooner Rudy (Your Time Is My Time) Vallee, 49, signed on as vice president, part-time plugger and salesman for a company making a coffee-flavored, carbonated soft drink called “Coffee Time.”

In the midst of New York City’s investigations into civic corruption, the tabloid Daily Mirror sent a reporter hustling down to ask ex-Mayor William O’Dwyer, now the $25,000-a-year U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, about his personal finances. His Excellency willingly opened up his bank books to show only modest deposits, said: “I have never owned or acquired wealth,” and, except as a lawyer for seven years, “have lived entirely on my salaries as a public servant since 1917…” Moreover, to furnish the embassy, O’Dwyer said he had to accept about $15,000 in gifts from friends & relatives, of which “$4,500 was spent on Mrs. O’Dwyer’s wardrobe in order to fit her out for the changed needs here as hostess and wife of the Ambassador.”