In Rome, Italian Film Director Roberto (Open City) Rossellini, 43, was asked by reporters whether Cinemactress Ingrid (Joan of Arc) Bergman, 34, the woman he plans to marry, is expecting a baby. Replied Rossellini: "How can I answer such a question when it would involve many other people?" Meanwhile Miss Bergman filed suit by proxy in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, for a quickie divorce. In Hollywood, her husband, Dr. Peter Lindstrom, made leisurely plans to file his own suit in the California courts.
Pianist Harry S. Truman is "much too modest" about his skill as a musician, Conductor-Emeritus Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony Orchestra said after visiting the White House. "We all know that he plays much better than he talks about it."
"The three W's and three D's of living," said the University of Chicago's famed Physiologist Anton J. ("Ajax") Carlson on the eve of his 75th birthday, "are work, work, work from diaper days to death. The goal of the current philosophy of the welfare state—security from cradle to grave whether you work or not—is both unscientific and unobtainable."
In the U.S.S.R., Moscow University Professor Zinaida Vishinsky, daughter of Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky, wrote a book. No potboiler, it was titled: Crimes in the Field of Labor Relations.
In Washington, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, ailing since last October, said he would resign from the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy as a start on taking things easier. No, he was not thinking of a Florida vacation: "I would just be on the phone every morning at 7:30 to find out what's going on."
Maestro Arturo Toscanini, pushing 83, was getting ready for a bit of traveling. Twenty days after his birthday next month, he plans to take the NBC Symphony on a six-week tour, conduct 21 concerts from New York to California.
The Cost of Living
Billy Rose and wife Eleanor Holm got home from a Broadway opening to find that their Manhattan town house had been robbed of more than $25,000 worth of jewelry by three holdup men. According to Rose, the robbers missed $250,000 worth of trinkets that Eleanor had worn to the play. Cracked Billy: "I'm glad Baby had her war paint on tonight." The Ago Khan got some $340,000 worth of jewelry back. Stolen from him last August it was returned mysteriously in Marseille in a package dropped in front of a police station. Seven men had already been arrested.
Justice costs the taxpayers a pretty penny, Attorney General J. Howard Mc-Grath said in Washington. He listed the costs of recent "big headline" trials: the Axis Sally trial came to $55,000; the Tokyo Rose case, $75,000; the trial of eleven Communists in Manhattan, $128,000; the Judith Coplon case, $75,000; the Alger Hiss case, $58,000.
Straight-shooting Movie Cowboy Bill ("Hopalong Cassidy") Boyd was beginning to look like the biggest moneymaking star in television. In Hollywood, Boyd's managers boasted that 54 Hopalong pictures were grossing $1,000,000 a year on TV. Boyd's take: $150,000 a year—not counting what he makes from movies, radio, personal appearances and various Hopalong cowboy toys and clothes.
The Strenuous Life