Theodore Roosevelt, who grew up to brandish a big stick, got an early start as a collegiate boxer. An exhibit of photographs, letters and other TRivia that opened last week in Manhattan furnished some fierce pictorial proof: a bewhiskered Teddy in his teens in fighting rig (with scowl to match) as a Harvard undergraduate (see cut).
For three weeks, white-thatched Jesse Jones had managed to avoid testifying on some 1941 oil deals. A doctor's affidavit averred that Jones had coronary heart disease, suffered from attacks of "paroxysmal auricular fibrillation," and was in no condition to appear in court. But the plaintiff countered with an affidavit of his own. The night the medical statement was received, he claimed, Jesse had sat up until 2 in the morning playing poker with the boys, and drinking "large quantities of whiskey." The stakes ranged high, and once Jesse "backed a straight in a pot involving . . . $4,000 against four fours ... [a practice] which has never been recommended as a cure for heart trouble." Next day the judge called Jesse to the witness stand.
llya Ehrenburg, strong-arm boy of Communism's literary goon squad, got roughed up a bit himself. llya, charged the Yugoslav Writers' Union in a classic piece of Marxist doubletalk, had himself been wavering from the party line on art. In one of Ilya's recent articles, he had expressed certain "esthetic sympathies" and had supported ideas "with which leading Soviet critics and also our own do not agree."
Eleanor Roosevelt, who had dismissed the Soviet constitution as merely "of pure propaganda significance," got a lofty consider-the-source retort from Izvestia: "Can a fly eclipse the sun?"
Edward Johnson, harassed general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Co., remembering what happened at last year's opening night (those newspaper pictures of diamond-encrusted dowagers with feet on table), had hopes that things would go better this year. In a pleading letter to editors, Johnson noted that last year reporters and photographers had emphasized "undignified incidents and poses." It was particularly distressing because "neither the episodes nor the individuals involved represented the ideals of the Metropolitan nor the artistic purpose it seeks to serve."
Jean-Paul Sartre was brooding about the U.S. version of his new play Red Gloves. It had been corrupted, he grumbled from Paris, into a "vulgar, common melodrama with an anti-Communist bias," and he wanted to see and approve a copy of the script before the show officially opened. Nonsense, snorted Producer Jean Dalrymple from Boston, where the show was trying out. The Sartre play had only been shortened, and besides, it was being rewritten all the time. And what's more, she added, Boston had given it "wonderful, wonderful reviews," and it would open in Manhattan this week, as scheduled.
Idle Hours
California's Governor Earl Warren was back at his desk in Sacramento after a brief vacation in Williams, Calif. In a couple of hours, he had managed to bag the two-bird limit of pheasant, and pose for a hearty sportsman picture.
The U.S.S.R.'s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Gromyko, was back in Moscow, after a two-month vacation in the south of Russia.