People: People, Nov. 14, 1949

Just Folks

Queen Elizabeth, mother of two, became an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Princess Elizabeth announced that little Prince Charlie, who will be one year old next week, has already developed an ear for music.

To help while away off-duty hours with the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet, the Duke of Edinburgh got a present from home: his yacht, the Cowslip, which arrived in Malta by aircraft carrier.

At a Tokyo horse show, Crown Prince Akihito, 15, ate his first hot dog.

Words & Music

“I don’t like jazz,” said the Archbishop of Canterbury, “although no doubt there is good and bad. It is one of my links with life I have not developed—yet.”

In a Manhattan police court, the Metropolitan Opera’s Lauritz Melchior helped to win dismissal of a complaint against the Korn Kobblers, a band of zany musicians. The police charge: the band had been riding along Broadway, making “unnecessary noise” with instruments that included “a pipe, a washboard and something that looked like an inverted spittoon.” Testified Melchior: some musicians, like Wagner, are simply ahead of their time. He assured the judge that to his sensitive ear, the Korn Kobblers were “expressing themselves in true American folk music.”

Arriving in Manhattan to take over direction of the Metropolitan Opera next June, British Impresario Rudolf Bing told newsmen that the Met was “in excellent shape as far as vocal talent goes,” but declined to be drawn out about its notoriously outdated scenery and production. Explained Bing: “It would be rather tactless of me to be critical now.”

Ernie Byfield, Chicago hotelman and nightclub impresario (the Pump Room, the College Inn), reached 60, took a dim view of the bistro business: “Nightclubs are like gold mines. For every ten bucks you put in, one buck is extracted . . . Old nightclubs and old streetwalkers are the same. The older they get, the less money they take in.

Friends & Countrymen

Seven U.S. Senators on a European fact-finding tour reached Luxembourg to find U.S. Minister Perle Mesta as good a hostess as ever. Mrs. Mesta greeted Oklahoma’s Senator Elmer Thomas with a kiss, then whisked him and his colleagues through a giddy two-day whirl culminating in a 55 guest dinner party. To round out the welcome, an overexuberant Luxembourg band serenaded the Senators (four of them from the South) with a lusty performance of Marching through Georgia.

Expatriate Raymond Duncan, the late Dancer Isadora’s creaky, Hellenoid brother, long one of the sights of Paris (see cut), arrived in the U.S. to spend a year celebrating his 75th birthday. With the Attic cultist came a member of the faithful whom he introduced as Mrs. Aia Bertrand, “a sort of Svengali.” He planned to put on his own opera (“a comic tragedy”) in Manhattan’s Town Hall, in which he would insure uniform quality by playing all the roles. Admission: free.

Captain Edward Molyneux, Paris fashion expert, announced without any reticence that he would use his visit to buy clothes fashioned in this country. He planned to pick up a few functional resort and play fashions and take them back to his Paris salon to adapt them for the continental trade.

In Madrid, Surrealist Salvador Dali put on his own version of Don Juan Tenorio, Spain’s traditional All Souls’ Day show. “I am too much of a Spaniard and a necrophile,” he said cheerfully, “to miss this chance—food and tombs on stage together.” Startled first-nighters saw the heroine clad as half nun and half Easter lily, her duenna completely faceless, another nun headless and one tavern character with two heads. Among huge fish, crawling monsters and enormous yellow butterflies, danced a coquettish, bell-shaped madonna. Exulted Dali: “I have never done anything so absolutely my own as this.”

Thick & Thin

George Bernard Shaw’s Buoyant Billions, his first new play in almost a decade, closed in London after a five-week run—the shortest a new Shaw play has ever had in the West End. “Well,” he shrugged, “I shall lose no sleep over it.” To an inquiring newsman who ventured to hope that 93-year-old Shaw was well, G.B.S. snapped: “At my age, young man, you are either well or dead.”

After deep thought, Hollywood Art Director Emrich Nicholson concluded that glamour girls look their best only against exactly the right backgrounds. For example, he said, Betty Grable shows up fine in a curlicued Louis XV setting, and Jane Russell seems to “go with a haystack.” Nicholson found one exception: Ava Gardner. “With that face and figure? Heavens, she’d stand out in front of almost anything.”

A California court ordered Movie Director Howard Hawks and his exwife, Nancy, to pay a year’s grocery bill of $3,590. What boosted the total: 3 Ibs. of hamburger, almost daily, for the Hawks’s four French poodles.

Recounting the rigors of his visit to the U.S., the Rt. Rev. John W. C. Wand, Bishop of London, told his diocese that he wound up feeling “rather like a squeezed orange.”

Vice President Alben Berkley began to fancy his privacy but went on paying the price of fame. His black limousine pulled up in front of a flossy Washington jeweler’s after closing time, and the door was opened for the bridegroom-elect. Afterward, newsmen told him that he had been spotted and asked for an explanation. “Oh, hell,” groaned Barkley, then sheepishly admitted shopping for a ring.

Chicago Hoodlum Roger Touhy, serving a 99-year term for the 1933 kidnaping of John (“Jake the Barber”) Factor, won a $15,000 settlement in his $500,000 libel suit against 20th Century-Fox for its movie, Roger Touhy, Gangster. Roger charged that the film had maligned him grossly. He planned to use the $15,000 in his “fight for freedom,” i.e., to beat the kidnaping rap, plus a concurrent 199-year sentence for his role in a 1942 jailbreak.