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In Hollywood, the grand old lady of the American theater, Ethel Barrymore, turned 75, still looked grand, and, in an interview with a New York Timeswoman, pronounced herself "wildly healthy." Ethel went on to diagnose the state of the lively arts. The theater, she decided, "looks pretty good—although none of the girls knows how to talk any more. Except Julie Harris, and that one can do any thing." Then Ethel disclosed that "I never go [to the movies], not even to my own. Why should I? I never saw myself on the stage either, you know." She had television down pat: "It's hell." Notwithstanding its hellishness, Actress Barrymore sat down last week and was photographed as she signed a long-term contract to emote in a series of half-hour TV shows, starting next April.
Onetime Chicago Daily Newsman Ben (The Front Page) Hecht, 60, who as a self-proclaimed Child of the Century has sampled most of the century's boozy philosophies, hit Chicago again and tried out his old beat in Women's Court. Reported Byliner Hecht: "In the 30 years since my byline was visible in this newspaper . . . things have changed, including possibly the shape of the earth. But . . . she was still there . . . trying to defend her wicked ways . . . The officer had spotted her talking earnestly to a strange man on the street corner . . . With her run-over heels and tongue-tied soul [she] will be the only thing the atom bomb will never change or remove."
At Minsky's burlesque house in Newark, N.J., where bumps and grinds have found refuge from Manhattan's clayfooted bluenoses, Mrs. Tommy Manville, 31, opened a one-week stand to supplement her income ($1,000 a week from Tommy). Asbestoscion Manville, 60, peevishly refusing to catch his estranged ninth wife's routine, snorted: "I haven't been to a burlesque for 46 years—and I won't start again with her stinky show."
In Chicago for the World Council of Churches assembly (see RELIGION), Germany's famed Pastor Martin Niemöller lit a long cigar and discussed tobacco as the hallmark of the theologian. Puffed he: "If he smokes cigarettes, he's liberal. If he smokes cigars, he's orthodox. If he smokes a pipe, he's dialectic. If he doesn't ( smoke, then he cannot be a theologian." Niemöller then admitted that the theory was not his, but that of Switzerland's pipe-smoking Theologian Karl Barth.