People, Dec. 15, 1952

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

British humorist and onetime M.P. Sir Alan P. Herbert, who recently wrote letters to editors suggesting that harsher punishment should fit the crime of burglary, interviewed a prospective cook who told him that she was not only adept in the kitchen but was most interested in re-reading some of his books. He hired her. After serving one meal, she left, taking with her A.P.’s family silver. Said the police later: the cook, better known as “Mary Jane,” had a record of bilking some 50 other households in much the same way. Said A.P.: “It is some consolation that we were taken in by an expert and not a novice.” Furthermore, he added, “she cooked a very good lunch.”

Onetime Bigtime Gambler Frank Erickson, the bookies’ bookie, released after serving 16 months for making book in Manhattan, went across the river and into New Jersey state prison to start a 12-to 14-month sentence for masterminding Bergen County gambling.

In London, Defense Minister Earl Alexander of Tunis suggested one possible cure for Britain’s current anti-Americanism. Said he: “Get to know the Americans . . . When you get to know the American people as I do, you won’t be anti-American.”

Hollywood missed a fast little cloak & courier mystery in its own backyard, according to Gossipist Louella Parsons. Had Oona O’Neill Chaplin and husband Charlie Chaplin decided to live in Europe rather than face the Immigration Department’s recent threat that Charlie might have trouble getting back into the U.S.? Wrote Louella: “Without a word of publicity and with only three people knowing it,” Oona slipped into Los Angeles for four days to lock up the Chaplin home and close out the bank account. “There is a strong rumor that Oona took back to Europe with her as much as $5,000,000 in cash.”

At his home in Paris, the Duke of Windsor dressed up in a velvet jacket and kilt and entertained his friends by singing Getting to Know You from The King and I. Among the enthusiastic guests: onetime Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, and Count Valdemar of Rosenberg, the King of Denmark’s cousin (who encored the Duke’s song with an exotic solo dance).

The Nippon Times carried the first post-marriage interview with Princess Yori, daughter of Emperor Hirohito. The princess, recently married to a commoner whose business is farming, reported that she gets up at 6:30 in the morning to help her husband care for their 300 canaries, 50 dogs, nine cows, 40 pigs, nine goats and 1,000 chickens. As for the eggs, they are bringing premium prices in Tokyo. Reason: merchants plainly mark them as products from the princess’ chickens.

For the first time since it received its charter in 1694, the Bank of England entertained a reigning sovereign at a meal within its vaulted halls on Threadneedle Street. Said Queen Elizabeth II, after she and the Duke of Edinburgh had lunched with the bank’s governor: “I remember coming here as a child with my grandmother and being fascinated, as all children are, by the sight of so much gold.”

Bit by piece, the monumental hoard of art and knickknacks collected by the late William Randolph Hearst is going under the auctioneer’s hammer. The latest group, some 300 pieces of old arms and armor, sold in Manhattan last week for a total of $40,810. The sale included a 16th century burgonet (helmet with cheek-pieces), the highest priced item, which went to a private collector for $3,200, and a 1560 wheel-lock Italian arquebus which the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought for $2,000.

At a Pentagon ceremony in Washington, Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt S. Vandenborg had a prize for General Curtis LeMay and his Strategic Air Command: the Daedalian Trophy for 1951, awarded each year to the command with the fewest aircraft accidents in at least 100,000 hours of flying.

Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, deputy commander of NATO, arrived in Lisbon for a five-day visit at the invitation of Portugal’s Defense Minister Lieut. Colonel Fernando dos Santos Costa.

The music critic of Washington’s tabloid Daily News confined himself to a one-sentence review: “Miss Jeanette MacDonald, wearing a shimmering cocktail dress, a six-foot-long fur piece and a hat with feathers, sang at Constitution Hall yesterday.”

The Defense Department announced that it had approved the request of Evangelist Billy Graham to make a gospel tour of Korea. In Manhattan, Francis Cardinal Spellman said he would spend his second Christmas in Korea, where he plans “to celebrate Mass in three different sectors of the front on Christmas Day.”

In Chicago, Thor Heyerdahl, who rafted his way to fame with the South Seas voyage of the Kon-Tiki, said that he was planning another expedition, “less spectacular and more sober-minded,” this time to South America.

British Poet-Critic Stephen Spender, 43, who once described himself as “a middle-aged man in the center of life and rotted by a modicum of success,” was appointed to fill the 1953 George Elliston Professorship at the University of Cincinnati. Spender, now lecturing in Brazil, will take the chair in February.

In Düsseldorf, a West German court ruled that the last will & testament of Adolf Hitler, drawn and signed on his last day in his Berlin bomb shelter (April 29, 1945), is valid. The will left his estate to the Nazi Party or the state government succeeding him. Among the losers under the ruling: a Swiss publisher and Frau Paula Hitler-Wolf, a stepsister, who sold the Swiss exclusive publishing rights to the record of Hitler’s dinner-table conversations. The result: no copyright protection. A German publisher, out with a pirated edition, can keep right on selling it.