People: City Hall

It was no week to be a mayor.

Mayor Martin Kennelly of Chicago, who makes a point of double-quick refuse collecting, got a complaint from a citizen whose wife had accidentally thrown $30 in the garbage: the collectors had whisked the stuff away before the couple could rescue the money. Kennelly quieted the man down—and set a perilous precedent —by forking over $30 out of his own pocket.

Mayor Earl Riley of Portland, Ore., home from a visit to San Francisco, got a visit from San Francisco’s Mayor Roger Lapham, who dropped in to sympathize. Riley was abed with three busted ribs after a skid in a San Francisco bathtub.

Mayor Ben Stapleton of Denver, 77, who fell on his face swinging at a baseball last fortnight, but rose in one piece, tested his cohesion again. As he entered the University of Denver chapel to make a talk, he neglected to open a plate glass door, strode straight through it. Again the mayor remained quite whole.*

Curtain Call

Generally, those rich in honors went on getting richer.

Francis Cardinal Spellman, already an honorary Osage Indian Chief, made the grade with the Sioux, was inducted into the Oglala Tribe as Wambli Ohitika (Chief Brave Eagle).

Bess Myerson, who was Miss America 1945, was picked to be Queen of Cotton* at the International Textiles Exposition in Manhattan next month. She slipped into a little something cotton to show that she was born to rule.

Secretary of State George C.Marshall became an honorary member of the Class of ’48 at Wellesley College.

Rita Hayworth was picked by The League for Health Education as “the actress who best personifies clean, wholesome living.” From a hyacinth field in Holland, where she was touring, came a picture of her rigorously personifying.

Winston Churchill received from Premier Paul Ramadier, in a ceremony in the court of Paris’ Hotel des Invalides, France’s highest military decoration, the Médaille Militaire, and with it the traditional perquisites: the right to an annual tobacco allowance of 200 francs ($1.65) and the privilege of billing the President of France for transportation in the event of illness (for instance, cab fare home if he became intoxicated).

Trade News

Margaret Truman, whose singing teacher said her voice was “much, much better” than when she made her radio debut eight weeks ago, signed a contract to make her “in person” debut at Pittsburgh’s Syria Mosque next week. It would be the start of a tour, with more concerts in Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma.

Rudy Vallee finished a month’s engagement at Chicago’s Copacabana nightclub (TIME, April 21), got the place blacklisted by his union (American Guild of Variety Artists). Complained Rudy: he couldn’t collect his last two weeks’ pay ($13,600). Explained the Copacabana: business was terrible.

Charles Chaplin’s “personality” offended the Independent Theater Owners of Ohio. The group, owners of 325 movie houses, urged all other U.S. theater owners to boycott Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, and not waste “valuable screen time … to his financial benefit.”

Sunlight & Shadow

Edgar Bergen’s daughter, Candace, turned one—and added just the right touch of realism to a birthday-party picture swimming in prinked-&-powdered prettiness. The dewy beauties: Mrs. Kay Kyser (ex-Model Georgia Carroll) & daughter Kimberly, Mrs. Robert Cummings & Robert Jr., Ginny Sinims Dehn & son David, Mrs. Bergen & Candace.

Jane Withers, veteran cinemadolescent, came of age and into legal possession of her $250,000 old homestead—and $125,000 worth of miscellaneous assets. Crooner Tony Martin pleaded guilty to driving 55 in a 25-mile-an-hour zone, got two days in jail. Actress Diana Barrymore and her husband attracted cops with some auto-horn-tooting, got arrested for disorderly conduct and assault & battery (on the cops). Scandals Producer George White, whose car killed a honeymoon couple last July, finished eight months and 16 days of a year’s road-camp sentence, went free for good behavior and hard work.

The Literary Life

William Shakespeare got a setback in Haverhill, Mass. Off the high schools’ required reading list went The Merchant of Venice, for its “distortion of Jewish attitudes and conduct.”

Robert Lowell, 29, looked like the year’s most rewarded poet. Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship ($2,500) last month, and a Pulitzer Prize ($500) last week, he now got a $1,000 fellowship from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts & Letters.*

Novelist Evelyn Waugh, resettled in Britain after a lush six-week stay in Hollywood (TIME, March 31), gave readers of the London Daily Telegraph the real Hollywood lowdown. On the cinemazation of literature: “Each of the books purchased has had some individual quality, good or bad, that has made it remarkable. It is the work of a staff of ‘writers’ to distinguish this quality, separate it and obliterate it.”

* This put him in a class with the late Margaret Tobin Brown, socially ambitious wife of a Denver miner, who survived the Titanic disaster, was thereafter known to Denverites as “the unsinkable Mrs. Brown.”

* Not to be confused with the National Cotton Council’s Maid of Cotton, or Memphis’ Cotton Carnival Queen, or Massachusetts’ Cotton Mather.

* All of which probably compensated for Columnist Franklin Pierce Adams’ published declaration that neither he nor New Yorker Critic Hamilton Basso had ever heard of Lowell’s prizewinning book, Lord Weary’s Castle (TIME, Dec. 16).