People, Sep. 22, 1952

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

A New York World-Telegram reporter, assigned to investigate the working conditions of Remington Rand’s new $100,000-a-year Board Chairman Douglas Mac-Arthur, finally found the place, a “Tudor castle” on a 30-acre estate near Rowayton, Conn. He found the general comfortably settled in an Elizabethan-type 25-by-40-foot office. Asked how he liked his new job, the Old Soldier answered: “I’m doing fine, sir; I like it fine.” Surprised at the presence of a reporter, President Rand asked if he had an appointment. “No,” said the general, “he just crashed the gate.” Rand then explained that the place was off limits to all reporters. Said he: “We try to keep it strictly private. We want it to be a place where our executives can come and think and do their work without being bothered.”

The London Times noted the 100th anniversary of the death of the Duke of Wellington, and credited him with founding the tradition of English understatement. Said the Times: “The personality of the Duke, conveyed in a thousand stories, which glorify a reticence, simplicity, and a fierce contempt for false sentimentality, has become a national myth. Like all myths, it has helped powerfully to form manners. Understatement has, in fact, become a national characteristic, and Englishmen, in the 18th century as lachrymose as any people in Europe, have given up weeping in public.”

The celebrated tabloid case of Billy Rose v. Eleanor Holm (TIME, Jan. 14) finally reached the comparative dignity of a jampacked little Manhattan courtroom. As a show it was Rose’s biggest flop. He had countered Eleanor’s suit for separation by charging her with adultery with five men about town & country, and the billing for the opening show promised the most sensational divorce trial in years. But the presiding judge quickly disappointed the expectant crowd of reporters. He called the principals and their lawyers into his chambers for a 2½-hour talk. When it was over, he announced that Billy had withdrawn his charges, agreed to give Eleanor her separation. Said Rose glumly: “You can’t win a fight with a girl.” But he brightened when he figured that the session with the judge had saved him about $1,000,000 an hour. There would be no lump-sum settlement as Eleanor originally demanded, and the court would decide on the amount of her alimony (temporarily running at $700 a week).

Producer Walter Wanger, 58, was released from jail’after serving 98 days of a four-month sentence (mostly on the Los Angeles county prison farm) for shooting Jennings Lang, agent for Wanger’s wife, Joan Bennett, in a Beverly Hills parking-lot encounter last December.

In Los Angeles, after a day of listening to his father Adlai on the hustings, 20-year-old Borden Stevenson bolted for an evening of bipartisanship dining and dancing with Dorothy Warren, 21, daughter of California’s Republican governor.

In Tokyo, the Imperial Chef and the Imperial Barber dropped some footnotes on the personal habits of their royal boss, Emperor Hirohito. The Emperor prefers either squash or sweet potatoes to rice, likes oysters, eels, noodles, and loves American candy bars. Because the imperial kitchen is so far from the dining room, he has also learned to like all his food served cold. Every two weeks he pays the barber $4 for a haircut. The Emperor is easy to work for, said the barber, but “he doesn’t take good care of his hair and mustache. Every time I’m at the palace

I clip His Majesty’s mustache into a neat, trim rectangle, but the next time I go, it is invariably out of shape.”

In Johannesburg, Prime Minister Daniel F. Malan ordered that no passport be issued to Chief Hosea Kutako, head of the Herero tribe of South-West Africa. The chief had been invited to London to deliver a sermon in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Said an angry canon when he heard the news: the South African government “spits at Christendom by refusing to allow this respected old Christian chief to come to Britain.”

In Des Moines, Iowa, former Vice President Henry Wallace, Progressive Party candidate for President in 1948, announced that he was still undecided whether to vote for Eisenhower or Stevenson this year. Said he: “Both are very splendid men. I am just waiting for their expression of views and to see what type of support each is getting.”

In a church in the village of Gunsbach, Alsace Lorraine, Organist-Philosopher-Missionary Dr. Albert Schweitzer gave an organ recital for an audience of one: Belgium’s Queen Mother Elisabeth.

Crooner Frank Sinatra, who recently announced that he was through snarling at reporters and photographers, offered some proof of his good intentions at New York’s Idlewild airport. When his wife, Cinemactress Ava Gardner, arrived for the Manhattan premiere of The Snows of Kilimanjaro (see CINEMA), Frankie not only smiled for the cameras, but gave them an added bonus: a husband-bussing-wife pose.

The Cuban Tourist Commission announced that the government’s Medal of Honor (for outstanding contributions to

Cuba) would be awarded this year to Ernest Hemingway for his new novel, The Old Man and the Sea.

At London Airport, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden welcomed 17-year-old King Hussein of Jordan. Next day the King drove down to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst to enroll for a six-month course in soldiering.

Tennis Champion Maureen Connolly,

17, returned to San Diego after successfully defending her National Women’s title at Forest Hills, to be greeted by 15,000 home town fans. The mayor proclaimed a Maureen Connolly Day, and announced that San Diego had chipped in some $2,000 to buy her a thoroughbred hunter, plus all the trappings and two years’ worth of oats and hay. Maureen’s plans: to go back to work as a cub reporter on the San Diego Union, with time out in November to fly to Australia to play in the Australian tournament circuit.

A reporter in Paris’ met Producer Sam Go’dwyn, who recalled what General Eisenhower once called his “favorite Goldwynism.” Said Sam: “I was asked if I was in favor of monogamy or polygamy. I was supposed to have replied, ‘Well, I’ll tell you. For the bedroom I like maple, but for the dining room I strongly advocate monogamy.” Added Goldwyn: “It was a nice story, and it was one I never heard before.”

Winston Churchill and wife put in at Lord Beaverbrook’s villa at Cap d’Ail on the Riviera for a two-week holiday. Asked if it was true that the Prime Minister had been spotted in Cannes smoking a pipe, a secretary dryly speared the rumor. Said he: “Mr. Churchill has not been in Cannes. Mr. Churchill smokes cigars.”