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They were playing the name game in New York's Pennsylvania Station, and Mrs. Charles Percy was trying to wrangle her way onto a jampacked Washington-bound train. Sorry, said the ticket clerk, the train is full. Up to the window stepped Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who modestly identified himself and asked for a ticket. "I don't care who you are, mister," snapped the clerk, "this train has been booked solid for three days." Enter Senator Edward Kennedy and Wife Joan. Ted hardly got past "I'm Senator Kennedy and I'd like ..." when the clerk produced not two but four tickets for the whole group. Noted Washington Post Columnist Maxine Cheshire, who reported the scene, "It just proves that the name Kennedy can take you almost anywhere you want to go."
Sixty-five years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt was asked by a concerned friend: "Can't you control your daughter?" Replied Teddy: "I can either run the country or control Alice—not both." Last week Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the indomitable "Princess Alice" of the T.R. era, turned 85. She is still splendidly uncontrolled, and refers to herself as a "withered Twiggy," a "likable old hag" or "one of those Roosevelt show-offs." Other times she settles for "a combination of Marie Dressier and Phyllis Diller." At her birthday party in Washington, where the guests included President and Mrs. Nixon, at their first private party outside the White House since the inauguration, she regaled the group with memories of the day she moved out of the mansion. As her parents drove her away in an open surrey, she recalled, she mimicked her father's rotund successor, William Howard Taft. She made what she thought were "horrible, fat, ogre faces" at the crowds, while calling "This, darlings, is what's coming after you."
The officials who took a look at 20th Century-Fox's movie, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, before it was screened for Queen Mother Elizabeth, professed to be shocked. That ten-second bit in which two of Miss Brodie's girls get a glimpse of a drawing of a completely nude male would have to go. The decision brought hoots of derision from London's press. Said the Daily Mirror: "The Queen Mother has two grown daughters and a clutch of grandchildren. She was married to a sailor. One of her sons-in-law was also a sailor. And sailors, according to popular legend, are salty characters who know all about life."
They might not make it as stand-up comics on the nightclub circuit, but the two gals were good for a few guffaws at the Women's National Press Club in Washington. "My telephone hasn't rung for three weeks," moaned Liz Carpenter, formerly Lady Bird's gag-a-minute press secretary. "I almost tackle the postman. These days I not only open those invitations to art exhibits at the Corcoran —I even go to them." Next came Gerry Van der Heuvel, Pat Nixon's press secretary, who remarked wryly that following Liz was like "trying to follow the Apollo 8 flight with a kite." But never fear—she got off the ground by pointing out that the first thing Pat was going to do up in the family quarters of the White House was "paper over all those enlistment posters for the Alamo."