General Dwight Eisenhower, who had hardly a moment to himself last week, took time to bless a typical U.S. product which many a citizen regards as a very mixed blessing. Said he: "You don't know what it means to hear language that clinks sweetly in our ears ... to hear commercials on the radio ... it means America."
Frank Sinatra, in Rome with a U.S.O. troupe, had an audience with Pope Pius XII and reported, wide-eyed, that the Pontiff had asked if he was a tenor or baritone. Said The Voice: "I was amazed the Pope had heard of me. I was speechless. I am enthralled by all the grandeur. I am thrilled. . . ."
Doris Duke ("Richest Girl in the World") Cromwell, of late an ink-dabbler, explained why in Rome: "I . . . feel definitely drawn to journalism as a means of self-expression." Hopeful of getting into professional ranks, she said: "At one point I thought I'd use a nom de plume but I reconsidered, because life is complicated enough as it is."
Archibald MacLeish, now an Assistant Secretary of State, was succeeded as Librarian of Congress by a professor-librarian with whom the poet had sometimes clashed: Acting Librarian Dr. Luther Harris Evans, a 42-year-old Texan.
Too-solid Flesh Admiral William F. Halsey, who
wants to ride through Tokyo on Hirohito's white horse, got encouragement from the Reno Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber ordered a custom-built, silver-mounted saddle for the Admiral, solemnly asked Washington for his beam measurements. "I wouldn't know about the posterior," said his daughter, Mrs. Preston Lea Spruance, a distant cousin (by marriage) to Admiral Spruance, "Daddy is about 34 inches around the waist, and his hips aren't much larger. Neither mother nor I has ever measured."
Hermann Göring, whose diamond-studded baton wound up in the White House last fortnight, lost his outsized pants to the Seventh Army.* Major General John W. ("Iron Mike") O'Daniel, 3rd Division commander, hung the Göring britches oh his wall, observed: "A lot of pants."
Ernest Hemingway, who tore his scalp open (52 stitches) in an auto crash in Britain last year, fared better when his car skidded on a wet curve outside Havana, piled up in a ditch. Added to the rich Hemingway collection of nicks. lumps, and bruises†: forehead scratches and a sore knee.
Arrivals & Departtures
Lieut. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt,
in the Navy since 1942, had a reunion with his energetic mother, Margaret Emerson, in Hawaii. The much-married (four times) Bromo-Seltzer heiress turned up as a Red Cross field worker, found that her 32-year-old millionaire-sportsman son looked less like a playboy.
Beatrice Lillie, before flying back tc Britain after a season on Broadway, told Manhattan reporters that Information, Please experts would hop to Europe this week and that she would guestpert for them in Paris about July 1. Clifton Fadiman, F.P.A. and John Kieran were surprised to learn where they were going.
Jim Thorpe, 57, the greatest all-around U.S. athlete of the '20s, saw his 18-year-old son go into the Navy, joined the Merchant Marine himself.
Fuller Explanations