People, Sep. 27, 1954

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

Onetime World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Jack Dempsey, 59, popped up in Buenos Aires on his first visit to the Argentine, where he was greeted by President Juan Perón (in whose honor, as “the world’s first sportsman,” a boxing festival was being staged) and an old ring foe, Argentina’s Luis Angel (“The Wild Bull of the Pampas”) Firpo. Argentines have always believed that Firpo, who lost the 1923 fight by a k.o. in the second round after Dempsey knocked him down nine times, really won it in the first, when he smashed Dempsey clean through the ropes. Gracious Guest Dempsey made the Peronistas exuberant by agreeing. Said he: “I don’t understand yet why they did not raise [Firpo’s] hand, because in my country when a boxer leaves the ring—and I did leave the ring—he has lost the fight. In my heart, Firpo was world champion of all weights.”

Setting a neat example for freeloading public servants who dote on hauling their relatives all over the lot at public expense, Admiral Arthur W. Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, landed at New York’s La Guardia Airport in a military plane after a flight from the capital, five minutes later greeted his wife, who flew from Washington by commercial airliner.

In Hollywood, a studio movie set was swept for action as red-haired Maureen O’Hara, wigged to her knees, prepared to re-enact history’s barest bareback ride in the title role of Lady Godiva of Coventry. After the set was cleared, all that remained were 14 film technicians (eleven of them women), no outsiders, not a single producer.

First Lieut. Roy M. Cohn reported with 120 less renowned National Guard officers for a two-week stint of training duty at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss. Cohn took time out one evening to tell a group of local clubmen that everybody “should be trying to stop Communism,” instead of criticizing his former boss, Senator Joseph McCarthy. His performance during the Army-McCarthy hearings having established him as something of an expert on the draft if not on wangling commissions, Cohn was naturally assigned to a group studying Selective Service. But when the nation’s Selective Service director, Major General Lewis B. Hershey, showed up and was asked to pose for a picture with Lieut. Cohn, the general, possibly recalling the sad consequences which overtook Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens after he obligingly posed with Army Private G. David Schine, retorted with a stiff, military “Hell, no!” Swinging down into the U.S. after a three-week royal tour of Canada, Britain’s handsome Duchess of Kent and her daughter, Princess Alexandra, 17, set Manhattan hostesses’ knees trembling to curtsy, boards ready to groan. But the Duchess, whose U.S. visit is unofficial, apparently evaded most of the lacquered talons, went quietly about sightseeing like any other tourist in the big city for the first time. At week’s end, with just as little fuss, she moved on to Washington, D.C., was soon swallowed up by the British embassy.

Italian Cinemactress Gina Lollobrigida arrived in Manhattan to boom her new movie, Bread, Love and Dreams. After standing for more than two hours while greeting some 750 news and film men at a free-flowing cocktail party, Gina plopped down into a chair, teeth prettily clenched on two rose stems, and massaged her tired feet.

Movie Producers Bill Pine and Bill Thomas, casting about for an actor to play the role of a governor of Texas in an oil-boom epic called Lucy Gallant, spotted just the man for the part while stealing a peek at television. Their choice: Texas Governor Allan Shivers, who left Austin last week for a two-week vacation in California, a two-day fling at being himself before Hollywood cameras.

Of all people, busty Cinemactress Jane (The French Line) Russell showed up in Paris at the salon of Fashion Dictator Christian Dior to give the lie to his new, widely deplored “flat look.” Jane’s own sentiments about Dior’s fashionable straitjacketings: “If a woman’s got it. you can’t do anything to suppress it.” Snapped a Dior aide in rebuttal: “She presents us with no problems we cannot overcome.” After half an hour in a fitting room, Jane, trailed by perspiring modistes, emerged in one of Dior’s prize creations: a black wool number with a low-dipping mink collar. Onlookers chorused a spate of oo-la-las and agreed: “But that is a challenge.” Purred Jane: “I love it.”