Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
Landing in Manhattan after a seven-month European concert tour, Peru's multi-octaved Singer Yma Sumac, with her son Charles, 5, in tow, bumped smack into immigration officials who detained her at the pier for an hour, then confined her to the New York City area pending a hearing this week. In tearful confusion, Yma wailed: "I didn't kill. I didn't rob. I didn't nothing. What?" Yma and her husband, Peruvian Composer Moises Vivanco (similarly treated when he returned to the U.S. last month), blamed the "professional jealousy" of Yma's rival warblers for hanging "some question of subversion" over both their heads. The immigration officials kept their silence.
In Denver on his first extended tour of the West, vacationing Student Arthur MacArthur, 16, son of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, was cornered by newsmen at a hotel, promptly showed an inherited talent for maneuver. Photographers slyly tried to get the lad to pose directly before several framed pictures of President Dwight Eisenhower. But young MacArthur was aware of his unguarded rear. "Oh no," he announced firmly. "My father doesn't want me to pose for pictures like that. He. told me: no political pictures." Then he faded away from the vulnerable sector.
Dashing Cinemactor Errol (Against All Flags) Flynn, 44, a well-docketed veteran of legal brawls (two divorce suits, one trial and one accusation of statutory rape), was all tangled up with another lady, though this matter had nothing to do with romance. The plaintiff: his former London landlady, winner of a court order requiring Flynn to cough up $128.80. This, she charged, was the amount she anted up to pay his unpaid bills after he moved out like Flynn. When he got the bad word, Flynn gave a defiant performance. "I shall not pay!" cried he. "I will defend this to the end [even though] it may cost me ten times as much as paying off—or 100 times . . . I'm mad . . . I'll fight to the death—even if I have to fly back here [i.e., London] from California." Harry Truman, after 19 days in the Kansas City Hospital, where he had survived a major operation and a dangerous infection (TIME. June 28 et seq.), checked out at 5:30 one morning, drove home to a quiet breakfast on the screened porch.
Austria's Prince Ernst RÜudiger von Starhemberg, 55, whose fascist bullyboys and Heimwehr provided a home-front imitation of Naziism until the real thing seized Austria in 1938, got more strange forgiveness for his past troublemaking: Austria's highest court handed back to him his 82 castles, estates and mansions, all of which were originally confiscated by the Nazis when they took over and remained in public custody at war's end.
Since 1943, Von Starhemberg has been holed up in Argentina—but for little good reason of late. Another Austrian court last year ruled that there were no grounds for trying him on charges of high treason.
Word sifted through the Bamboo Curtain that France's General Christian de Castries, gallant loser of the siege of Dienbienphu, was being "well treated" in a Viet Minh prison camp.