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Barely wrapped in, 35 yards of white chiffon, Marlene Dietrich, the only grandmother in the world who can knock down $35,000 a week by hiding an unremarkable singing voice inside a remarkable body, opened a new show at Las Vegas' Hotel Sahara. Outlined provocatively by a breeze from a giant fan, Marlene strayed blithely off key, to nobody's discomfort, in such trademarked barroom ballads as Lili Marlene and See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have. The Sahara's front room was packed with boys of all ages who had what they wanted right there.
In Dallas, Manhattan Lawyer Maurice ("Tex") Moore, 58, chairman of the board of TIME Inc.. popped up at the Texas State Fair to accept the third annual "Texan of Distinction" award (previous recipients: Standard Oil Co. (N.J.) President Eugene Holman and Chrysler Corp. President Lester Lum Colbert). The honor, restricted to Texas-born men who have won national distinction, was symbolized by a big Steuben glass vase decorated with Lone-Star motifs. On hand was Moore's mother, Mrs. Ollie Thompson Moore, 81, renowned as Texas' first woman bank president and longtime leader of the Texas P.T.A. Beaming at son Maurice and mindful of her pride in her other children (another son and daughter) as well, Mrs. Moore quipped: "We are all on speaking terms now because we used to be on spanking terms." Rejoined Distinctive Texan Moore: "She was quite direct in her methods."
Hollywood's chief watchdog over movie morals, Joseph I. (for Ignatius) Breen, 64, stepped out after 20 years as lord high censor and administrator of the industry's Production Code (except for an incongruous hiatus in 1941-42 when he quit to be general manager of the RKO studios). Ailing for the past two years, Joe Breen, in doing his thankless job, was scarcely the wet blanket that some producers, irked by his merciless cutting shears, often made him out to be. A one-time Philadelphia newsman and a Roman Catholic by birth, big, bluff Joe Breen could, and did, use such purple language in excoriating purple film passage? that few moviemen ever thought of him as a professional bluenose. Sticking always to the letter of the code, Breen would issue such blunt suggestions as, "Eliminate, wherever it occurs, the action of Spit actually expectorating." To producers who tried to cajole him into letting naughtiness slip through, he would snap, "The back of me hand to you," or worse. Breen's longtime chief assistant, Geoffrey Shurlock, 60, by all signs an equally incorruptible man, took over the job.