People, Aug. 9, 1954

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

At a ceramics show in Long Beach, Calif., a bust of a young girl was exhibited by a sculptress whose name had a gaslitera ring to older art patrons. The artist: onetime Showgirl Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, 69, who was plunged into scream-headline scandal (and won the dubious title of “the girl with the bee-sting lips”) in 1906, when her husband, millionaire Financier Harry K. Thaw, in a jealous fit of suspicion, shot and killed the nation’s No. 1 architect, Stanford White, on the nightclub roof of Manhattan’s old Madison Square Garden. But the sting was gone now. “I live each day for what it brings,” said Sculptress Thaw. “I’m happy. I’m at peace. And I work very hard.”

Vacationing with his father in Alaska, John Fell Stevenson, 18, confided to a newsman that Adlai Stevenson still has no yen to live in the White House. Said young John: “He doesn’t want to be President. He isn’t campaigning. He is just helping the [Democratic] party pay off the deficit from the last campaign.”

The lanky woman in dark glasses, wild bobbed hair and flat-heeled shoes could be none other than retired Cinemactress Greta Garbo, 48. As she got off a plane in Los Angeles after a virtually anonymous year in Europe, a newsman popped a random question: “Are you in love—are you going to be married?” He was on the wrong track. “Please,” replied Garbo with distaste, “I do not want to talk about that. I’m so tired—so very tired.” Then she was driven off to her chosen limbo.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, 55, likely during the court’s summer recess to turn up anywhere, turned up in Australia hobnobbing with outbackers. After a week’s trial of aboriginal delicacies, he was still in ruddy good health. Sample daily menu: scrambled turtle eggs for breakfast, stuffed high-jumping wallaby for lunch, roast flying fox (an outsize bat) for dinner.

Mae West, 61, a latter-day blonde with original curves, made her night-club debut in the Sahara, a Las Vegas saloon, and proved that “my brand of sex” is still a basic barroom commodity. Mae’s brand consisted of herself and “the first barechest act for lady customers in history”—eight muscle-bound young men in loin-cloutish Bikinis, one of them the current “Mr. America,” the rest onetime contenders for the title. All in all, Mae’s troupe proved invigorating even for jaded

Las Vegas; reservations for her show were running ahead of the records set by such semidraped past performers as Marlene Dietrich and Terry Moore. Never breathless except when stirred by her own emotions, Mae explained why she is still in tiptop shape: “I walked five miles a day with two men for three months before coming up here.”

French Flight Nurse Genèvive de Galard-Terraube, 29, rejecting the label of “angel” despite her 56 days of selfless ministration to the sick and wounded in Dienbienphu, arrived to visit the U.S. at the invitation of the U.S. Congress.* In Manhattan, Nurse Geneviève was treated to a parade up lower Broadway. Next day she hopped down to Washington and was soon sitting in the front row of the House of Representatives’ diplomatic gallery. Gleefully getting around an inflexible House rule that no gallery visitor may be introduced or even pointed out, Minnesota’s Republican Representative Walter Judd reminded the House that Geneviève was in the U.S., welcomed her and suggested that “we pay tribute to her—wherever she may be.” Smiling demurely, Geneviève got a happy, if oblique, bipartisan ovation. Two days later, standing between Ike and Mamie Eisenhower on the steps of the White House’s rose garden, Heroine De Galard-Terraube received the U.S.’s Medal of Freedom with a bronze palm. Then she headed West for more acclaim.

One of California’s top eligibles, Governor Goodwin J. (“Goody”) Knight, 57, whose first wife, mother of his two grown daughters, died in 1952, announced that this week he will marry Mrs. Virginia Carlson, 35, whose husband, an Army Air Force bombardier, died in a 1944 raid on Rumania.

Handing circumloquacious Committee Counsel Ray Jenkins the job of boiling down the 2,000,000-word transcript of the Army-McCarthy squabble to a terse report was more or less like asking a mighty gale to become a zephyr. Last week Acting Committee Chairman Karl Mundt complained that Jenkins’ “bulky” summary would take two days just to read, let alone digest. Down in Knoxville, a trifle hurt by his caucus-room pal’s reflection on his distilling prowess, Jenkins replied testily: “It was reduced from a 7,424-page document down to 447 pages… accompanied by a brief that contained less than 450 pages.”

* According to her House sponsor, Ohio’s Frances Bolton, the first foreigner so honored.