Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
At the Rome airport, a minor Italian movie producer spotted a traveler who strikingly resembled Actor Laurence Olivier, "only he was older and shorter." Thinking quickly, the producer introduced himself and offered the man the lead in a film burlesque of Olivier's Hamlet. The man, who identified himself as "Mister Smith," roving salesman of bathroom supplies, eagerly accepted the offer, promised to go to work as soon as he had sold his supply of basins. The producer happily spread the news of his coup in Rome's movie circles, then read in the next day's paper that his discovery was actually Olivier himself passing through Rome to make a new movie in Ceylon.
The Saturday Evening Post announced that it had bought the partial memoirs of Charles A. Lindbergh, in which the notoriously shy "Lone Eagle" tells the story of his life up to and including the transatlantic flight which made him famous. Title of the story: "The Spirit of St. Louis." Reported price: $100,000.
When Asbestoscion Tommy Manville, 58, decided that the time was ripe for his twelfth marriage (this time to Mrs. Lillian Bishop Alvear, 29-year-old divorcee and mother of two children), he found the process getting slightly more difficult. The city clerk in New Rochelle, N.Y. refused to sell him a license; but he was able to buy one in Greenwich, Conn., which requires a five-day wait. Then came bad news from Manhattan. Anita Frances Roddy-Eden Manville, his most recent wife, who bought a Mexican divorce last year, swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills when she heard of Tommy's latest romance. She recovered with still worse news for Tommy: her Mexican divorce was no good, and she wired her lawyer in Mexico to prove it. At week's end, with the Connecticut waiting period over, the Manville love score stood: 11 previous marriages, one presumptively legal wife, one frustrated fiancée.
In Florida, where he is wintering, Robert Frost, four-time Pulitzer Poetry Prizewinner, had good news from Manhattan: the Academy of American Poets had awarded him their annual $5,000 fellowship for 1953.
In Rio de Janeiro, President Getulio Vargas ordered a tighter control over the Brazilian Confederation of Dove Fanciers. His decree: people who profess ideologies contrary to the legal regime are henceforth forbidden to raise carrier pigeons.
In Yonkers, N.Y., Mrs. Earl Browder, 56, Russian-born wife of the former head of the American Communist Party, charged with perjury and illegal entry into the U.S., was served with a deportation warrant by immigration agents. Pleading illness, she posted a $2,000 bond pending a formal hearing.
Morton Sobell, the atom spy who was convicted along with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (now in Sing Sing under death sentence), was transferred from the Atlanta penitentiary to serve his 30-year sentence in the "maximum security" of Alcatraz.
Still convalescing from his month-long siege of influenza, Pope Pius XII canceled his routine private and public audiences as the only celebration of his 77th birthday and the 14th anniversary of his election to the papal throne.