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People: The Restless Foot

6 minute read
TIME

Arriving in Manhattan, Playwright-Actor Noel Coward appeared to be in a grave, no-nonsense mood befitting his years (50 this week). Undismayed that his last three plays have been failures in London, he told the New York Times: “I shall write new comedies, for I have a great wit and I am a gifted man as well as being a very hard worker.”

Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Y. Vishinsky left New York aboard a U.S. ship, bound for his homeland after almost three months in New York as chief of the Soviet delegation to the U.N. His parting tip to three porters who carried his mountain of luggage aboard: $40. His parting words on shipboard: “I want to wish all the ‘American people a Happy New Year.”

Madam Ambassador Eugenie Anderson, 40, of Red Wing, Minn.—the first woman Ambassador in U.S. history—sailed from New York to take up her post in Copenhagen, Denmark. With her went Johanna, 15, Hans, 11, and Husband John, who was proud not only of his wife’s big new job, but of his own small triumph over bureaucracy. At first the State Department, which pays the overseas passage of Ambassadors’ wives, ruled that since there had never before been any dealings with an Ambassador’s husband, he would have to pay his own way. Anderson kept demanding his rights until Washington finally came through with his fare.

New York’s durable Mayor William O’Dwyer, 59, recovering from virus pneumonia and nervous exhaustion, started a vacation in Florida.

Arkansas’ Governor Sidney McMath, 37, arrived in Manhattan to confer a special honor of his state, the title “Arkansas Traveler,” on a Center Point, Ark. girl: department store Bigwig Dorothy Shaver, president of Fifth Avenue’s Lord & Taylor.

Sir Laurence Olivier, arriving in New York to make his television debut, was saddened because many people in England had misinterpreted the role of Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, currently being played in London by his wife, Vivien Leigh. The character is not a prostitute, Sir Laurence explained patiently. “After the initial tragedy that affected her life, in her subsequent misguided search for beauty and romance, she came to lead an immoral life; but there was no intention to suggest that it was in any way professional.”

The Personal Approach

The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York discovered that there’s nothing like an oldtimey masked ball to attract partygoers. Staging a masquerade in the Waldorf-Astoria grand ballroom for its Pension Fund, the Philharmonic lured in 1,200 masked dancers, twice the number that attended two previous open-faced fund-raising parties. Among the celebrities and socialites who showed up (at $25 a ticket): the white-tied Marquess of Milford Haven and his American fiancee, Mrs. Romaine Simpson; black-tied ex-King Peter of Yugoslavia and Queen Alexandra; Warren Austin, permanent U.S. delegate to the U.N., and Mrs. Austin, wearing a notably fancy mask which partygoers took to be a huge butterfly whipped up by a famous designer. She finally disclosed that she had made it herself out of some old tulle and brilliants she “found around the house” and it “represented absolutely nothing at all.”

Shirley Temple, a mother and a divorcee at 21, ruefully pondered her future in Hollywood: “I’ll be sorry for the next man I go out with. Can you see the headlines? I think my next date had better be J. Edgar Hoover. He’s an old friend and was my first crush—when I was nine years old.”

Having already faced the fact of being a grandfather three months ago, Broadway’s reigning Matinee Idol Ezio (South Pacific) Pinza struck a surefire pose for photographers (see cut) with his new grandson, John Hall Boiler Jr., son of Metropolitan Opera Lyric Soprano Claudia Pinza, in private life the wife of her manager.

“I’m strictly the home girl now,” Lana Turner confided in Hollywood. She and her husband, Tin Plate Heir Henry J. (“Bob”) Topping, have quit nightclubbing, she said, for the “good life” of staying home evenings and watching television on five sets they have had installed in various rooms of their house.

“I am about the greenest corn there is,” admitted John Barrymore Jr., 17, son of the late John (the Great Profile) Barrymore and onetime Cinemactress Dolores Costello, as he discussed his first professional acting role in Sundowners, a forthcoming horse opera. “I’ll be lucky if I can come anywhere near my father’s standards in 20 years. The last thing I want to do is become a second-rate carbon copy of my father.”

How does it feel to fly the needle-nosed rocket plane, Xi, through the atmosphere at 100 miles an hour faster than the speed of sound? “It’s no different than sitting in an armchair at home,” Air Force Test Pilot Captain Charles (“Chuck”) Yeager, 26, told newsmen in Dayton. “Actually you’re traveling at a pretty rapid clip as you sit in your armchair.” His explanation: the earth is spinning on its axis at a speed which reaches 1,035 m.p.h. at the equator, while the speed of sound is only 760 m.p.h.

In Devonshire, England, the Duke of Bedford, 60, announced with a stiff upper lip that he has turned 50-room Endsleigh, one of his three mansions, into a boardinghouse. Room & board: from 12 guineas ($35.28) a week.

The Earl of Harewood, 26, King George’s nephew and recently wed (to Austrian-born Pianist Marion Stein), announced in Leeds that he will sell most of his 24,000-acre family estate to meet taxes.

The Laurels

Charles A. Lindbergh, 47, in recent years a special consultant to the U.S. Air Force, got a top-drawer U.S. flying award: the 1949 Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy for “significant public service of enduring value to aviation in the U.S.” over the last 22 years.

Maestro Arturo Toscanini, 82, was named an honorary lifetime senator of the Italian Republic. He promptly declined the honor in a cable that asked Italy’s President Luigi Einaudi not to regard the refusal “as a discourteous or arrogant act,” but to interpret it “in the spirit of simplicity and modesty that inspired it.”

A white marble mausoleum enclosing the body of Bulgarian Communist Government Founder Georgi Dimitrov was opened to the public in Sofia as a Communist shrine. Like Lenin in Moscow, Dimitrov was embalmed by a secret Soviet process to preserve his body for the ages.

In spite of an official Czechoslovakian campaign against “decadent American jazz,” Paul Robeson proved a box-office flop in Prague when pitted against Harry James and his trumpet. Concerts of recordings by both artists were played in a theater at different times on the same afternoon. An overflow audience jammed the theater to hear James, but half the theater’s seats were vacant when the Robeson records were presented.

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