Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
After a clinch over a divorce settlement and alimony, Hollywood's No. 1 box-office draw, John (The Quiet Man) Wayne, 46, and his estranged, Mexican-born wife, Esperanza, 31, suddenly broke clean and began swinging wildly in court. John, Esperanza charged, drank too much. "All the trouble I've had came out of a bottle," said she. Then she recalled how He-Man Wayne had dragged her about by the hair and another time by a foot in hotels. Nonsense, retorted John. It was Esperanza's own "excessive drinking" that caused her to fall sometimes—and then she would blame her bruises on him. Esperanza said that John also cursed her (she repeated some of his words in a whisper to the deadpan judge) and once doused her with rubbing alcohol. Well, snapped Wayne, Esperanza neglected her household duties. Esperanza then told how John had once returned from a Honolulu stag party with a stripteaser's "large black bite" on his neck. And after one studio party, he came home tight at dawn, smashed a door pane to get in, admitted he had dropped by the house of his costar, Gail (The Lawless) Russell. Countered Wayne: one whole week, when he was away in Hawaii, Esperanza's home-loving house guest was Hotel Heir Nicky Hilton. At week's end, the Waynes agreed to agree on money, but John still intended to have his day in court. Hollywood was touched by his pained candor as he drawled: "I deeply regret that I'll have to sling mud."
Grandma Moses, 93, showed up spry as ever in Manhattan to present one of her latest primitive paintings, The Battle of Bennington, to Mrs. George Kuhner, who accepted the canvas for the Washington, D.C. museum of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
To Saudi Arabia's old (73) King Ibn Saud, ill with a heart ailment, went a get-well-quick message from Queen Elizabeth.
Over the official East German radio came news that Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, 63, top Nazi general captured by Russia at Stalingrad in the 1943 debacle of the German Sixth Army, was finally coming home. After ten years of coddled denazification in Moscow, during which he helped organize some 100,000 fellow captives into a Free German army, Von Paulus is now presumably a good enough Communist to command an East German army.
Coolly rejecting Winthrop Rockefeller's offer of a divorce settlement (for a reported $5,500,000), Bobo Rockefeller was now rumored to be angling for a separate maintenance only. Meanwhile, Winthrop was still holed up on a mountain in Arkansas, where as a six-month resident he could sue Bobo for divorce on Nov. 30.
After complaining to French officials in Corsica that his assigned quarters of 37 hotel bedrooms had bad plumbing, leaky roofs, and cramped his style of living, Morocco's exiled former Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Youssef persuaded his keepers to move him into 50 rooms in the island's flossiest hotel. The Sultan's ménage: 14 concubines, two wives, two sons, two daughters, three servants.