Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
Sauntering across Korea, preceded and pursued by wolf cries from U.S. troops, Cinemactress Marilyn Monroe appeared on open-air stages in a skin-tight purple cocktail dress. She talked some and sang a bit before a microphone, but mostly she just showed off her unspoken lines. Results: stampedes of G.I.s tried to overrun cordons of military police; one amateur soldier-talent show haplessly billed ahead of Marilyn's appearance was stoned. Once, Marilyn had to take off by jeep from some 6,000 ill-disciplined troops who rushed the stage. She also discomfited MSAdministrator Harold Stassen, who made the mistake of dropping in on one U.S. division the same day Marilyn was distracting it. Muttered he: "I did not have this much competition when I ran for the presidential nomination." At Taegu Air Force Base, her last wolf-whistle stop, Marilyn was "very pleased" to find her famed nude calendar photograph pinned up in the mess hall. "I wish I could have seen more of the boys," she purred. Returning to Japan, she was briefly bussed by her groom, ex-New York Yankee Outfielder Joe DiMaggio, who somewhat obliquely announced to her: "I've found a place in Osaka that has a very good pizza."
To a rapt audience at Baltimore's Goucher College, Novelist Carson (The Member of the Wedding) McCullers streamed through her consciousness, trying to tell the strange tale of how she and Playwright Tennessee Williams converted Member into a Broadway hit one summer on Nantucket Island. "Ten's not a cook and I'm not a cook, and the house kind of went to pieces," recalled Carson in a kind of far away tone. "We ate mostly pea soup with wienies in it, I guess, and the cat had kittens on my bed. There were milk bottles and whisky bottles everywhere, and the windows were all blown off in storms and these strange cats would come in." On the play's opening night, storm-blown Carson "was so scared and so worked up I couldn't go, so I stayed home and ate spinach."
Army's outspoken Football Coach Earl ("Red") Blaik, irritated by persistent de-emphasizers of intercollegiate sports, took a flying tackle at them and their "theory of mediocrity." Said he gruffly: "They've made it so you feel there's something shameful about having a good team ... If they succeed in getting rid of football . . . they'll have Americans like the French, spending their time sitting around in sidewalk cafes, sipping drinks and eying the girls."