(2 of 2)
Actor Henry Fonda, 61, squinted at the watercolor in Manhattan's Cober Gallery and grinned: "My, what a lovely painting. I wonder who did that." Actually, the masterpiece, entitled The Old Quarter, Gerona, was an original 1966 Fonda. Hank, who paints as much as he acts, donated Gerona to a benefit sale for the Gotham Chapter of Retarded Infants Services, an event that also featured the efforts of such old masters as Soupy Sales and Xavier Cugat. "I take such a joy in painting," said Fonda, inspecting the art with his wifely muse of five months, Shirlee Mae.
Manhattan's Grand Old Lady of 39th Street, the Metropolitan Opera House, has a lot of friends to save her from Götterdämmerung. A committee has been lobbying to prevent the building from being demolished to make way for an office skyscraper. Trouble is, the Met itself doesn't share their concern. The company, now housed in Lincoln Center, stands to lose $500,000 per annum in rent on the proposed office building; worse yet, the Met would have to pay a pretty penny just to keep its old home in repair. Taking all that into account, Brooklyn Democrat Emanuel Celler, 78, reported con brio in the U.S. House of Representatives: "By saving the building, they may destroy opera in New York." Besides, "some of the members of this citizens' group would think Puccini was the name of a spaghetti."
"Because he loved animals so, we put a watering trough in front of his grave," said Rhena Schweitzer Eclcert, 47. "A sheep lambed on his grave, and we think he would have liked that." Whether the late Albert Schweitzer would like what his daughter has been trying to do with his notoriously primitive hospital at Lambaréné since the doctor died last September is another matter. "We have finished the electrification of the wards," she reported, on a rare trip to New York, adding that a refuse-disposal system has replaced the garbage barrels that the goats used to love so much.
Paroled after serving 16 years of a 30-year stretch for atomic spying, Biochemist Harry Gold, 55, emerged from Pennsylvania's Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary into a drenching rain. "The sun is shining for me," beamed Gold. He had told the Government all about his work as a Communist spy, and had testified in 1951 as a vital Government witness in the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. "I have wiped the slate clean as far as it is possible," he said. "I made a hideous mistake."