Woman at Work
Fully aware that a few memories might have dimmed in the 16 years since she had last been seen and heard in England, Tallulah Bankhead gave the public a refresher course when she arrived in London to do a radio show. The course began with a press conference in the green and gold Marie Antoinette room of the Ritz Hotel.
Tallulah swept in, dressed in a sleek black dress, and called for a champagne cocktail. When it appeared, she hopped upon the nearest chair, poured the champagne into her black suede shoe (size four) and drank a toast. Shouted Tallulah: “Winston Churchill is my god, and I’m just mad about England. I mean Britain. I just love you all like crazy.” Then she hopped down, tapped the nearest waiter, kissed him four times and said, “Darling, bring me a drink.” As other waiters scurried to be of service, she cautioned the cameramen: “Don’t shoot me grinning. I look like the Cheshire cat.” As she answered reporters’ questions she pleaded: “Don’t say I’m gracious and charming. You’ll ruin my reputation.” For the benefit of a middle aged, overwhelmed reporter who had kissed her hand, she graciously jiggled through the Charleston until her stockings began to sag.
An hour and a half later the course, which included Tallulah’s rumbling rendition of Juliet’s balcony scene on the hotel stairway, was over and memories were considerably freshened. One waiter muttered in stark wonder: “Nothing like this has ever happened here before.”
Purple Raiment
After meeting Spain’s First Lady, Hearst Columnist Cobina Wright noted her impressions of Señora Carmen Polo de Franco: “In her lack of affectation, she reminded me much of our own Mrs. Truman. I told her as much and she replied that this was a great compliment . . . She told me something of her household routine. ‘Every night after dinner, if there is no official function, the Generalissimo and I sit quietly at home . . . My husband does not smoke or drink, except for an occasional glass of wine with dinner. Then, too, every night there is the matter of arranging the next day’s menus. When we do not have guests, this is an easy matter, for our own tastes are very simple. We both eat anything.’ ” Concluded Columnist Wright: “I felt that, despite Señora Franco’s position as virtual ‘Queen’ of Spain, I had been visiting with any typical well-to-do American housewife.”
Atlantic City paraded another year’s harvest of beauty. Top of the crop and Miss America for 1952: a statuesque Westerner, Colleen Kay Hutchins of Salt Lake City, 25 years old, 5 ft. 10 in. tall, weighing 143 lbs., oldest and huskiest girl ever to capture the crown, the tallest winner in six years, the first blonde in 13. Her take: the usual $5,000 scholarship plus whatever she can make in a grueling year of personal appearances and testimonials. Her ambition: the usual stage career.
In Cannes, King Farouk, whose appetite runs to rare and beautiful objects, paid $4,500 for a butterfly collection that caught his eye. Next day, his hotel manager, who happened to hear that the King liked frogs’ legs, ordered a special banquet for the royal party: 1,200 legs rushed down by train from Paris.
Sporting Life
For the first time in its 197-year history, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St. Andrews, Scotland elected an American to be Club Captain: Francis Ouimet, 57, of Brookline, Mass., onetime captain of America’s Walker Cup team, and first amateur to win the U.S. Open (1913). Ouimet will begin his one-year term next week after following through the ritual of “playing into office,” i.e., going the 18-hole Old Course and tipping his caddy a pound note.
The Second International Gerontological Congress, meeting in St. Louis, had an impromptu session with ancient (somewhere between 43 and 51) Pitcher Satchel Paige, brought back from the Negro American league this season to throw his “nuthin’ ball” for the St. Louis Browns. How did he keep in shape? To an impressed audience Satchel explained that he started early by avoiding beer, whisky, gin, tea, coffee, chicken livers and lamb. If you smoke, he added, don’t inhale. “I just blows it out my nose.” Playing ball in the summer, hunting every day in winter, also help. “I’ve got to keep my legs good because if your legs go bad your arms go bad.”
After spending a quiet summer vacation at home in Spokane, where she played the role of sportswoman, went mountain fishing, hooked a plump Kamloops trout and had a photograph to prove it, Metropolitan Opera Soprano Patrice Munsel returned to Manhattan to find a goodly catch there, too: three new roles for the winter opera season, plus news that her first popular recording, Bella Bimba, was headed for big sales.
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