Turinese Tailor Antonio Santomauro, who made the elaborately embroidered Mantle of Peace worn by Pope Pius XII for special ceremonies, was busily stitching away at two more peace jackets. One, of Tibet wool, double-breasted with four gold buttons and an embroidered globe carried by two small doves, will go to Harry Truman. To Joseph Stalin, courtesy of Tailor Santomauro, will go a single-breasted job, buttoned to the throat, with one embroidered dove.
In Manhattan, warming up for her debut as a pro, Gertrude ("Gorgeous Gussie") Moron modeled her latest play to the tennis galleries: leopard-skin panties. Undecided what to wear on her six-month tour of the country, she thought it would be "something simple, made out of better material than the dresses for amateur matches"—perhaps black velvet panties "completely covered except when I move."
In Chicago for a series of lectures, T. S. (The Cocktail Party) Eliot, 62, mused: "The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest . . . You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down . . . Basically I am a very lazy man . . . After Christmas I will try to get down to doing another play. I know that no one ever has two successes in a row, so I am writing the next play for a small out-of-the-way theater in London . . . You must go on living day to day, but you cannot go on . . . without hope. If there is not hope, then we would all lie down and expire."
Said Hollywood Tough Guy John Garfield: "I'm not tough . . . Hell, I haven't had a fight since I was 13."
James A. Farley, in Spain for his third visit since the war, had a 40-minute chat with Franco, failed to get official permission to enlarge his Barcelona Coca-Cola plant.
Home from the hospital, nursing his recently fractured thigh, George Bernard Shaw, 94, confided to a visitor: "I don't think I shall ever write anything more." Otherwise, said his doctors, their patient was doing well; he was allowed to leave his bed for 90 minutes a day to take wheelchair tours of his flower beds (see cut) and soak up the autumn sun.
The Yankees' pitching pride, Southpaw Eddie Ford, 21, was awaiting another decision: results of his second draft physical to find out whether an intestinal bug picked up in Mexico two winters ago had gone away.
The Furrowed Brow
Dosed with penicillin and fighting a cold, Marlene (the "World's Most Glamorous Grandma") Dietrich arrived in London 24 hours behind schedule to play a middle-aged film star in the film No Highway. She still had time to call a press conference and set reporters straight on a matter of figures. Said she: "I am 44, not 47."
Speaking at Western Reserve University, David Lilienthal, onetime boss of the Atomic Energy Commission, decried scaremongering, but conceded that "any person who wants to live a peaceful, quiet, uneventful life has just picked the wrong time to live."
Excited rumors ran through Paris that France's No. 1 Communist Maurice Thorez had been liquidated, but it turned out he was merely resting comfortably in his villa after getting treatment for high blood pressure, brought on, said his doctors, by "physical and intellectual overexertion."