People, Oct. 4, 1937

“Names make news.” Last week these names made this news:

Traveling from Indianapolis where they campaigned for the local Civic Theatre, Cinemactress Mary Pickford and Husband Buddy Rogers stepped off a train in Manhattan. Said she: “Buddy and I are planning a new home. . . . It won’t be as pretentious as Pickfair. Mercy, no! Only four master bedrooms, and of course tennis courts, swimming pool and things like that.”

At an early morning hour, Hollywood police received a call from oldtime Funnyman W. C. Fields, now 58, who said his butler and his secretary, pretty Carlotta Monti, were having a big argument in his hallway. He wanted it stopped. When police arrived at Funnyman Fields’s house, he and his secretary were in their rooms and the butler said it was all a mistake. Few minutes later police returned to find all three spatting in the hallway. Howled Funnyman Fields: “It’s all right to argue in the daytime, but Iwant peace and quiet at night. She came in late and awakened the butler, and startedthe row.” Retorted Secretary Monti: “Mr. Fields let me in and started the argument. The butler merely tried to soothe him. And besides, I got hit.” Funnyman Fields saidhe, too, got hit; neither of them said by whom. The butler said nothing and the befuddled police left.

At a meeting of the Philadelphia Regional Safety Conference, Liberty Leaguer Lammot du Pont, president of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., declared his conviction that traffic-regulating signs are dangerous because they tend to confuse drivers’ minds. Publisher David Stern’s pink Philadelphia Record editorialized: “The next time Mr. du Pont sponsors a political organization that is opposed to government regulation of the power industry, or the stock market, or the monetary system, remember that Mr. du Pont also is opposed to traffic lights.”

Back to the U. S. after visiting Italy returned R.C.A. President David Sarnoff. Said he: “At the time of his death it was published widely that the late Senator Guglielmo Marconi left a fortune of about $25,000,000. As a close friend of Marconi for many years, I saw the members of his family while in Europe. They told me that the gross value of the estate left by the Senator will not exceed $150,000.

Through his solicitors in London, venerable Statesman David Lloyd George brayed a “very strong objection” to Trivial Fond Records, a book written by Sir Laurence Guillemard, oldtime British Treasury official. The passage deemed likeliest to have touched in Lloyd George the sensitive pride of all flesh: “He woke us all up at the Treasury, worried us to death, trampled on our most sacred feelings. We often sympathized with Mrs. Lloyd George, who is reported after exceptional provocation to have said that the first time she saw her husband he was in the hands of police and that she sometimes wished she had left him there.”

Young Jewish Violinist Yehudi Menuhin recently announced he would play the world premiere of Robert Schumann’s lost violin concerto in St. Louis on Nov. 12 (TIME, Aug. 23). At his summer home in Los Gatos, Calif. Violinist Menuhin last week received the following cable from Germany: “German Government decided today world premiére performance Schumann Concerto can only take place at official anniversary Reichskulturkammer, Berlin, Nov. 13. All previously announced first performances elsewhere with piano accompaniment must be postponed to Nov. 14.”