Take It or Leave It
Between shows in the capital, Musi-comedienne Carol (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) Channing disclosed that her giddy role had not kept her from observing a phenomenon across the local footlights. Her dictum: "Washington audiences come to the theater as researchers. They watch me like hawks and . . . treat me with the deference they would accord to a symphony, but it's impersonal . . . If Americans are ready to accept big people with close-cropped hair and large eyes like me, Washington wants to know about it. I have a feeling I'm being examined and absorbed and filed away, because you never know when I might come in handy, if I'm really the new American taste."
In Dallas, where such Hollywood rooters as Producer David O. Selznick and Cinemactor Ronald Reagan tried to cheer up some 1,000 low-grossing movie exhibitors at a morale meeting, Evangelist Billy Graham popped in with an idea for curing the industry's ailments. Cried Graham: "Take sex and crime out of the movies. We've had so much sex in this country till we're sick to death of it. That's why people stay away. Decent people are ashamed . . ."
After being lionized as the old darling of the Cannes film festival, veteran (68) Slapstick Producer Mack Sennett returned to Hollywood with a bit of advice for Americans going to France: "Don't be surprised by anything." To show what he meant, Sennett recalled a Maurice Chevalier show in Paris where the chorus girls bounced around naked from the waist up. Said Sennett primly: "I had to clean my glasses three times to make sure."
In London, at a Mothers' Union session presided over by his wife, the Archbishop of Canterbury, father of six sons, thumped for bigger British families. Said he: "A family only truly begins with three children. Thereafter . . . majority rule becomes at once possible. After all, that is the beginning of democracy . . ."
Old Wine, New Bottles