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Sirs:
You may Point with Pride but if I were you I'd View with Alarm the fact that of all the magazines** going to my residence, TIME and LETTERS are the only ones ever filched by co-dwellers-or-visitors† in my apartment house. . . .
(As you probably know, New York apartment houses are designed by architects who never read magazines and thus aren't interested in installing mail boxes of proper size; so magazines are dumped into a common basket or spread upon a lobby table.)
Apparently reading TIME is conducive to petty larceny. . . . Pardon, grand larceny. I suppose this new breed of criminal starts out by making off with TIME, works up to FORTUNE and then runs away with the firm's funds and prettiest blonde.
can't believe the post office is at fault, for all of the other magazines always show up— some of them for much longer than the subscription period. . . .
CLARK KINNAIRD
King Features Syndicate, Inc. New York City
Astaire's Discoverer
Sirs:
Your excellent cinema columnist trod on a sensitive spot and misled the public in the article on Fred Astaire (TIME, Sept. 9). Mr. Astaire was established on the screen in Flying Down to Rio, for which picture I brought him to Hollywood and teamed him with Ginger Rogers. . . .
Owing to a slight delay in getting the picture started, he was farmed out to MGM, purely for economical reasons and not because of any lack of esteem on our part for him. The few feet accorded his two feet in Dancing Lady went practically unnoticed, whereas in Flying Down to Rio he was acclaimed by public and reviewers alike all over the world.
I grabbed him as a "sleeper" the minute I saw his first test from New York and practically used the megaphone to tell everyone in Hollywood that here was the next big male draw in pictures. . . .
Mr. Merian C. Cooper, then executive producer on the lot, also saw Astaire's possibilities. Mr. Astaire will be glad to tell you that I accurately predicted to him in New York, before he ever came out here, what his future in pictures would be.
Louis BROCK
Author and producer of Flying Down to Rio
Beverly Hills, Calif.
*Who assassinated the tyrant Hipparchus (514 B.C.) and were in turn put to death—ED. **TIME, LETTERS, FORTUNE, Reader's Digest, House & Garden, Better Homes & Gardens, McCall's, Pathfinder, Literary Digest, New Yorker, Popular Science. †Apparently of the "white collar" class—$5,000 a year up.