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Pia Lindstrom, 27, was firm about one thing. "I would be very happy to become a fine actress like my mother," she said in Rome. "But I am not competing with her." On the face of it, Pia could give her mother, Ingrid Bergman, some pretty fair competition, though she wasn't looking like Joan of Arc when she played the screen tests for The Devil in Love, a merry morality film in which Pia would try to get Satan to join the angels. If Ingrid's girl gets the part, she may have the most unlikely little devil in the world fall in love with her: Mickey Rooney.
In an elegant speech on "History as Literature" before the Society of American Historians in Washington, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, 72, told a wry tale. "Some years ago," he said, "a colleague in the State Department wrote papers in such beautiful prose that I found myself influenced toward conclusions which, when challenged, I could not justify. Protection against this siren proved simple. Another colleague rewrote the paper in telegraphese, leaving out most adjectives, inserting the word 'stop' for periods. This exorcised the magic. Too much art in the mixture and, in Sir John Seeley's contemptuous words, 'history fades into mere literature.' "
As one of his executors pointed out, "The question is no longer of any concern" to Master Showman Billy Rose, who died Feb. 10 of lobar pneumonia. But his two sisters are bitterly concerned, as they demonstrated in Manhattan's surrogate court by filing suit against Billy's temporary executors, charging, among other things, a failure to honor their request that he be memorialized with a $125,000 burial plot and monument. So poor Billy's body has been waiting in a cemetery receiving vault for eight weeks while family and lawyers haggle. Meantime, his fortune, variously estimated between $10 million and $30 million, has been temporarily reduced by roughly $600,000 because of a dip in the market price of A.T. & T. in which the Bantam Barnum, with 160,000 shares, was the biggest single stockholder.