For the needs of Red China, Comrade Soong Ching-ling has a warm and open hearth. When the nation's mass drive for steel started a month ago, the 68-year-old lady had her secretaries build a small furnace in the garden of her Shanghai home. There—said Radio Peking—the secretaries now toil blithely from dawn until evening, producing as much as 341 Ibs. of good-quality steel a day. Last week, according to commune knowledge, the lady joined the workers in the garden, saying: "Making steel also tempers people." As vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, sister of Nationalist China's Madame Chiang Kaishek and widow of the founder of the Chinese Republic, she is an alloy herself—Madame Sun Yatsen.
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"Eartha Kitt advanced her feline personality across the footlights," wrote a London critic, "offering songs full of menace and other unmentionable qualities and complaining I Wanna Be Evil, as if we did not know." Then, after the Royal Variety Performance, Eartha became a wide-eyed child in brief converse with Queen Elizabeth II.
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White Supremacist John Kasper, 29, whose unpopularity in the North is exceeded only by his unpopularity in the South, was still a loser. Three months out of jail (for riot agitation in Clinton, Tenn. in 1956), rickety John was given a six-month stretch at Nashville's Davidson County Workhouse, after an all-male, all-white jury convicted him of riot agitation in 1957.
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Richard George, 69, quit his night-shift job as a billing-machine operator in the Reader's Digest circulation fulfillment department, went back to England and his full identity: Richard Lloyd George, second Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, son of World War I Prime Minister David Lloyd George. When his father died in 1945, the new earl succeeded to the title but inherited nothing of the $300,000 estate, discomfitedly said: "If he was going to leave me the baby, he should have given me a perambulator to put it in." Home after ten years of self-exile, he set up temporary digs in an unheated room (built by his father for a farm employee) at Heather Cottage, Churt, Surrey, planned to scrape up a few guineas by turning up at the House of Lords, where peers in attendance get $8.40 a day.
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Among the shards of her career as a Congresswoman was one smoldering chunk that Minnesota's 45-year-old Coya Knutson might have expected. Her vacillating husband, who supported her opponent in September's primary but threw his weight behind Democrat Coya before her defeat in last week's election (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), was bringing a $200,000 alienation-of-affections and slander suit against Billy Kjeldahl, 30, the lady's administrative assistant. Billy had not only "interfered" with his marital rights, charged 50-year-old Innkeeper Andy; he had also called the plaintiff "an impotent old alcoholic."
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