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Teamed up to do the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which he starred on Broadway and she in London, Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh were in Hollywood leading the strenuous life. While slouching through a drunk scene on the Warner lot, Brando stirred up an old shoulder injury, was laid up for three days. Meeting the press in the costume of Streetcar's nymphomaniac heroine (a faded dressing gown and blonde wig), Vivien announced that she had "discovered square dancing . . . [which] seems to be the best possible way to get one's exercise."
The Lucky Ones
At Atlantic City, brown-haired, brown-eyed Miss Alabama, 20, a Mobile belle named Yolande Betbeze, was crowned Miss America of 1951. The winning measurements: bust 35; waist 24; hips 35½; weight 119; height 5 ft. 5½ in. Her prizes: a $5,000 scholarship (which she will use to take singing lessons), a $1,875 Nash convertible, and chances to earn $50,000 through personal appearances. Said Yolande: "I bet mother is thrilled."
The $54,762 estate of British Socialist Harold Laski, who died at 56 last March, all went to his wife. But a token part of Laski's library went to his old friend and onetime associate at Harvard, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.
Tallulah Bankhead, who charged that a Procter & Gamble shampoo, plugged on the radio as "Tallulah the Tube . . . Take me home and squeeze me," had damaged her reputation about $1,000,000 worth, settled out of court for somewhat less. About $5,000, said a spokesman for the defendants, was a "warm" guess.
H. L. Mencken observed his 70th birthday by presenting a null collection of his manuscripts and literary accumulations to Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library, where, the satirist recalls in Happy Days, "I had a card before I was nine, and began an almost daily harrying of the virgins at the delivery desk."
U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson informed officials at Middletown, Conn, that he was "very disappointed," but he wouldn't be able to get back to his old home town for the opening of the new state express highway, Acheson Drive.
Troubled Times
Nevada's Senator Pat McCarran informed the Western Shoshone Tribal Council that because of the Government's policy prohibiting the naming of federal landmarks for living persons, they might not name their lake after Sond-hoo-vi-a-Gund (Man-of-many-Songs), a renowned Shoshone chief better known to palefaces as Bing Crosby.
Ordered confiscated as "fascist literature" throughout the Soviet zone of Austria: Crusade in Europe, by Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The rumor that he had turned up at a Manhattan cocktail party in a gold lame dinner jacket was greeted with a huffy denial by Noel Coward: "I have always had a reputation for being a conservative dresser and for dressing in good taste."
As he was being lifted into his blue Cadillac, Sweden's lanky, 92-year-old King Gustaf V gave his head a bad bump, nonetheless went on to preside at a cabinet meeting at the Royal Palace.