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The stylish assemblage of ladies at a Washington tea party looked more like a country-club dance committee than the practical female politicos they are. Wearing the choicest congressional chapeaux, six of the nine Democratic women now in the House of Representatives gathered to enjoy hat chats and conversation about legislation. The exuberant lawmakers (left to right): Missouri's Leaner Sullivan, Michigan's Martha Griffiths, Idaho's Grade Pfost, Pennsylvania's Freshman Kathryn Granahan, Oregon's Edith Green, Georgia's Iris Blitch.
Ill lay: Bess Truman, 71, resting comfortably in an Independence, Mo. hospital after breaking her left ankle in a stairway fall at home; cinema Tough Guy Humphrey Bogart, 58, slowly mending from throat cancer surgery last March despite weight loss (he now scales 120 lbs. v. his normal 150); Wisconsin's Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, 47, out of Bethesda Naval Hospital in time to attend the opening of Congress, recovered from further surgery on the site of an operation he underwent last summer for removal of a tumor in his right leg.
Obviously hopeful of landing a future Cabinet job or at least of becoming his state's senior Senator, Oregon's junior Democratic Senator Richard L. Neuberger drew guffaws on Capitol Hill by solemnly proclaiming the formation of the National Friends of Wayne Morse, Oregon's senior Democratic Senator already chasing his party's 1960 presidential nomination. Chuckled one Washington wag: "Dick should have called it the National Friends of Richard Neuberger!"
"Nobody believes me!" sobbed Hollywood's foremost nonacting Cinemactress Marie ("The Body") McDonald. To tell the truth, few did. Marie's hair-greying tale—of being kidnaped, doped, raped and tossed into the California desert night—was as hard to believe as if it had all happened to her before cameras for a Grade B thriller. A Mexican and a Negro, youthful, hopped-up and zoot-suited, had abducted her in a car, claimed blonde Marie, after announcing: "We want your money, your rings and your body!" Some 150 miles away and 24 hours later, a truck driver spotted The Body wandering dazed along a highway, her hair sand-matted, some fingernails broken, face cut and bruised, two caps missing from her front teeth. After Marie, heavily shrouded and eerily resembling a Picasso portrait, had left a hospital with her current flame, Cinemactor Michael Wilding, the cops themselves were arguing about the evidence. Why had Marie's captors foolishly let her make three phone calls? How come a doctor found "no evidence of any type of criminal attack"? Sighed Marie's ex-husband No. 3 and 4, Shoe Shogun Harry Karl: "I'm glad she's all right, but this whole thing is amazing. I'm a normal businessman and I wanted a good wife and children. She's just beyond me!"
Was it whiskey or weariness that had caught up with him?
—A Walk on the Wild Side