• U.S.

People, Jul. 20, 1959

6 minute read
TIME

At a film festival in West Berlin, Italian Cinemorsel Sophia (That Kind of Woman) Loren happily clutched a floral tribute, smiled appreciatively while the beleaguered city’s gallant Mayor Willy Brandt (TIME, May 25) grabbed a vase for her bouquet. At Brandt’s city hall, Sophia also signed a “golden book” for distinguished visitors, accepted from the mayor a white porcelain replica of the city’s freedom bell, whose original, presented to Berliners by the Crusade for Freedom, hangs in the city hall tower.

After brooding over the incident for several days, the U.S.’s Nobel Peace Prizewinning Diplomat Ralph Bunche spilled some distasteful beans in New York City, where he lives and works as the U.N.’s Under Secretary for Special Political Affairs. In outlying Forest Hills, Bunche’s 15-year-old son had been casually invited by his tennis instructor to join the famed West Side Tennis Club, scene of the biggest U.S. tournaments and within walking distance of Bunche’s home. But when Ralph Bunche, a Negro, tried to arrange the light-skinned lad’s membership with the club’s president, a Manhattan public relations man named Wilfred Burglund, he got a blackball response: the biggest tennis club in the U.S.’s largest Negro community, the world’s biggest Jewish community, excludes both Negroes and Jews. What’s more, Burglund told Bunche, the admission of Ralph Jr. would mean the resignation of at least 200 of the club’s members. “Neither I nor my son regards it as a hardship or a humiliation,” said Dr. Bunche. “It is a discredit to the club itself. If I were younger, I think I’d put in an application—just for the hell of it.”

Presidential recollections go on and on. Last week the Washington Post and Times Herald drew some lively ones from old (70) Headwaiter William Reid, long the Pullman Co.’s major-domo in charge of private railway cars for the White House and State Department. Reid’s bipartisan White House favorites: Harry Truman and Grace Coolidge. Of Harry: “He got up every morning at 6, and we’d stop the train so he could take his walk.” Of Gourmand Warren Gamaliel Harding: “He’d eat anything.” Of Calvin Coolidge: “He never used to say much, except when he read the papers he’d grunt, ‘I thought so.’ ”

All of California’s Governors eventually get hung in the state capitol in Sacramento, and Portrait Subject Goodwin Knight, 62, California’s Republican helmsman from 1953 until this year, knew that he would be no exception. From the start he failed to hit it off with Minnesota Artist Cameron Booth, picked by a nonpartisan art committee from more than 100 painters to immortalize Goodie in oil for a $3,000 fee. Last week Knight saw the result for the first time. His reaction: anguish. His main objections were to the color of his suit (brown, which he never wears) and the angle of his gaze (oblique, instead of piercing the viewer from any angle). Said Goodie: “All the eyes follow you at the capitol. That’s very important. [Culbert] Olson and [Earl] Warren—the eyes follow you. I said to Booth during the sittings, I said, ‘Mr. Booth, please, put the eyes like Earl Warren’s. I’ll give you the money to go to Sacramento to see Warren’s eyes!'” The esthetic quarrel will be resolved with Booth collecting his money for a canvas probably destined for indefinite storage in the basement of San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor. Cried Knight’s wife Virginia: “Goodie looks so thin.” Snapped Booth: “It was a fiasco.” Said Goodie Knignt: “To hell with it.”

In Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds, which lets ticket-buying prospectors keep any find under five carats, a Texas lady unearthed a 3.65-car. rock. She promptly named it the “Faubus Diamond” after the state’s Governor Orval E. Faubus, of whom she is “a great admirer.” The stone, naturally, was a white diamond.

Dame Margot Fonteyn, 40, top ballerina of Covent Garden’s Royal Ballet, has not been home much recently. Her most publicized wandering pirouetted her smack into “the presidential suite” of a Panamanian jail after her husband, ex-Panamanian Diplomat Roberto (“Tito”) Arias, took her along on a comic-opera invasion attempt aimed at overthrowing Panama’s government with a motley seven-man force (TIME, May 4). She was booted from the country next day. Last week Covent Garden’s directors announced that the West’s greatest ballerina will no longer be billed as one of its regulars. From now on, peripatetic Dame Margot will be a “guest,” dancing with the troupe “when she is available.”

On the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Ness, six Scots, presumably of sound mind and eyesight, espied the lake’s most celebrated resident frolicking in its blue waters. From one sea-serpent watcher came the latest description of the elusive, shy Loch Ness Monster: “I saw several humps and a long, thin, brown-colored tail in the middle of the lake. The backwash was about the length of three fishing boats.”

Ireland’s behemothian Brendan Behan, 36, playwright (The Quare Fellow),autobiographer (Borstal Boy) and mighty tosspot, treated Londoners to thetragicomic spectacle of a prodigious four-day binge. Checking out of a Dublinhospital where he had languished while voluntarily drydocked for repairs, Behan flew to England “to get a little wet,” and him a diabetic. The highlight of his lurching odyssey came when he roared into London’s Wyndham’s Theater to catch a performance of his hit play, The Hostage. He heckled the cast until its outraged actors stepped out of their Behan characters to bid their creator “Shut up!” For a grand finale, Behan bounded onto the stage, began a song and jig that the falling curtain cut short. At week’s end, after a three-hour respite in the local jug, he paid a 70¢fine for public drunkenness, $2.10 for medical patchwork on his face, battered in several arguments. Then, downing a slug of Irish whisky and four beers, he flitted back to Dublin. Waving to a crowd, he turned, dew-browed, to a newsman, whispered weakly: “Get me home. I’m very ill.”

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