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Sir: Your fine cover story on Nicole Alphand [Nov. 22] portrays a remarkable woman and a remarkable way of life, but it omitted a large facet of that life. Nicole Alphand has been directly responsible for several hundred thousands of dollars pouring into Washington charities' needy coffers. She has organized benefit balls, attended and sponsored countless luncheons and fashion shows, donated "specialties" from her chef and French products to bazaars, opened the embassy to paid tours (benefiting the Salvation Army and Good Will Industries). In addition, indirectly she and the ambassador are responsible for even more thousands of dollars by adding their glamour and prestige to many other charity affairs that would be dreary without them. Washington needs 107 more Nicole Alphands!
JANE E. WHEELER Washington, D.C.
Sir: If Madame Nicole Alphand is important enough to have her picture on the front cover of your magazine, and if your story about her and the other goings on in Washington is even partly true, heaven help this country! We have surely entered our decadent period, and we're in real trouble!
LEONARD MARIN Homewood, Ill.
Sir: It occurs to me that so much chic and taste is absolutely vulgar. Judging from the TIME photos, Mme. Alphand appears to have reached the peak of human automation. Do the American officials in Washington all really fall for such Continental decadence and tinsel? It makes me feel I should come to the defense of my country. And a husband who kisses you on both cheeks if you're in and shakes your hand if you're out: really!
Give me the African yearly jammed session any day.
ANNE FESSENDEN Lecturer in French University of New Mexico Albuquerque, N. Mex.
Sex, Soap & Brains
Sir: Without a doubt the least excited readers of the goings-on in the "Harvard Sex Scandal" [Nov. 8] that the various tabloids have been immortalizing lately are to be found at Harvard itself. We could have put the gentlemen of the press well at ease and saved them their vain searches these last few weekends through the cellars of Cambridge for further evidence of the promiscuity that they hoped was to be found. To those of us who do not always have the time or inclination to go elsewhere for our bacchanalian weekends, the only alternative might be thought to be Radcliffe, but this, in fact, means complete abstinence, for there is little to recommend such an idea. In Radcliffe we have a seminary in which the prime virtue seems to be the displaying of the most acute sartorial inelegance that it is possible to imagine, an inelegance that has as its cardinal philosophy the belief that at all times brains and soap are mutually exclusive.
However dismal these facts may be for Harvard men, they nevertheless bear eloquent evidence to the world at large of the biological impossibility of any real sex scandals in these parts, even if we are to pursue the principle of chacun à son goût to the limits of absurdity.
E. K. FARIDANY Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Harvard University