Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
Polish-born pianist Artur Rubinstein, 68, down south in Birmingham for a concert, looked back on decades of U.S. tours, hailed the cultural progress of the nation's hinterland, parts of which were once dismissed by H. L. Mencken as "the Sahara of the bozarts." Rubinstein sees the U.S. as a sprawling oasis: "In the past 25 years this country has made more advances than some places in Europe have made in 250 years. Small towns throughout America are more receptive to fine music than old cities in France like Lyon, Marseille and Bordeaux."
Billing himself as "An Evening of Culture at the Corcoran," chain-smoking Cartoonist Al (Li'l Abner) Capp strolled into the Washington museum, ripped joyfully into modern art while his listeners choked, fretted and guffawed nervously. Capp's special quarrel was with the pure abstractionists—"that small group of the unbalanced who sell shameless products through a larger group of avaricious and unprincipled to an enormous group of the totally dazed." Aren't the abstractionists' products good for anything? Sneered (Ugh!) Critic Capp later: "They'd make good neckties for Elks' conventions!"
The Pacific Coast's Australian-born International Longshoremen's Boss Harry Bridges, who rocks with the Reds but enrolls with the Republicans, hove into a California court and met an old acquaintance, Restaurateuse Sally Stanford (real name: Mabel Janice Busby), now retired from a crimson career as one of San Francisco's red-hot madams (her once-elegant Pine Street hostelry is now a booze dispensary called the Fallen Angel). At the Valhalla, Sally's fancy restaurant in Sausalito, Bridges was caught in the men's room last September by two seamen, both unfriendly members of the Sailors Union of the Pacific. They worked him over, choked him with his necktie, kicked him, groined him, blackened his eye. Sally sallied into the men's room, got her ankles booted for her solicitude. Now they were together again for the trial of the two sailors, whose plea was not guilty. Sally stuck by her original contention: "We sure as hell didn't start it!"
Norway's Princess Astrid, bedecked in décolleté gown, tiara and decorations (including Norway's highest, the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav), celebrated her 25th birthday at the home of her yachtsman father, Crown Prince Olav. More than ever a public figure, Astrid has ranked as her country's "first lady" since her mother's death in 1954, is kept constantly bustling in good works.
The National Institute of Arts and Letters proclaimed Novelist John (U.S.A.) Dos Passes, 61, the winner of its gold medal for fiction, handed out once every ten years. Presented for the "lasting contribution" of an author's entire works, the gold medal has previously gone to such literary lights as Thornton Wilder, Booth Tarkington, Willa Cather, William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton.