New Hampshire's Novelist Grace (Return to Peyton Place) Metalious blew into Manhattan, called a press conference, was soon berating Hollywood Producer Jerry Wald for more or less tricking her into writing her latest exposé of small-town wickedness. In agreement with most critics, Grace growled: "This isn't a novel; it's a Hollywood treatment." Added she: "It was never intended to be anything else. It was a foul, rotten trick. They made a hell of a lot on Peyton Place, and they wanted to ride the gravy train."
In the wake of his recent statement that Soviet composers like to rehash old Czarist motifs instead of going in new directions, Conductor Leonard Bernstein, lionized in the Soviet Union only three months ago, was drawn and quarter-noted in the newspaper Soviet Culture. It was also hinted that when the hit musical West Side Story is adapted for Soviet consumption, Bernstein's music for the show will be inaudible. Meanwhile, top Russian Composer Tikhon Khrennikov, who toured the U.S. last month (TIME, Nov. 23) with four other leading Soviet musicians, spoke out on his impressions of popular capitalist music. Most jazz musicians, including Trumpeter Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong, he adjudged "vulgar, unnatural and in anything but good taste." But he had a kind word for Clarinet Virtuoso Benny Goodman: kho-lodny (real cool).
—
Detroit society was bracing itself for the most glittering, opulent blowout in the city's history. Four days before Christmas, Car Czar Henry Ford II and wife Anne will play host to some 1,000 guests at the Country Club of Detroit, which will be extensively redecorated, just for the evening, to provide proper dash and elegance for a ball whose theme will be 18th century French. Occasion: the coming-out of their daughter, Debutante Charlotte Ford, 18. The guest roster is a Who's-Really-Who of U.S. business, upper-crust society and showfolk, with a suitable seasoning of European nobility.
To aid flood victims in the French Riviera town of Fréjus (TIME, Dec. 14), Artist Pablo Picasso donated two of his still-life paintings for auctioning in Paris, appealed to all painters to follow suit by giving a canvas for the cause.
No sooner was ex-Chicago Bootlegger Roger ("The Terrible") Touhy paroled from the Illinois state pen last month (TIME, Nov. 23-30) than a book titled The Stolen Years, Touhy's rip-roaring life story, was published by Cleveland's Pennington Press. The hot volume, co-authored by Chicago Newsman Ray Brennan, is chiefly devoted to protesting Touhy's innocence of the wacky 1933 kidnaping of Swindler John ("Jake the Barber") Factor, a crime for which Touhy served 25 years of a 99-year stretch. The complaint against the book: it alleges that Factor committed wholesale perjury to railroad Touhy to the big house. Last week Jake the Barber, now a well-to-do Beverly Hills philanthropist, sued Pennington and seven other defendants for $3,000,000. Complaint: libel and invasion of privacy.