If any proof were needed that New England Industrialist Bernard Goldfine no longer has any White House influence, it came in a blockbusting indictment from a federal grand jury in Boston. The longtime crony of ex-Presidential Aide Sherman Adams was smitten with two charges: evasion of personal income taxes (1953-57) amounting to a whopping $450,961, and dodging corporate income taxes (1952-57), owed by his Strathmore Woolen Co., to the tune of $340,784.
On a local TV program. Kansas City's forthright Artist Thomas Hart Benton, 70, broke off from mural painting in the nearby library of his old friend, Harry Truman, to lower a heavy easel on Russian art. Said he: "They have no use whatever for all this individualism, abstract impressionism, and what Harry—President Truman—calls 'ham-and-egg art . . .' The only good art they ever had was the art the church took out of Byzantine Greece into Russia—the making of those icons. Their realistic art is the worst kind of art borrowed out of the worst period of European art—the salons of the middle of the last century. It's worse than our advertising art, which is bad enough. It's exactly Madison Avenue turned to political purposes."
At a Manhattan premiere of the movie Can-Can (see CINEMA), New York University Junior Carol Heiss, 20, newly crowned queen of Olympic figure skating, showed up with a fellow bladesman, Dick Button, 30, who won the men's title in the 1948 and 1952 Winter Olympics. Earlier, in properly cold weather, Carol was honored by some 250,000 admirers, who cheered her way up snow-lined lower Broadway. After she had kissed Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. seven, times (once for him, six more times for photographers), His Honor piped: "Best thing that's happened to me all day!"
Japan's commoners caught their first glimpse of their new prince, Naruhito Hironomiya, and his commoner mother, Crown Princess Michiko. All bundled against the cold, the two-week-old princeling was whisked from the Imperial Household Hospital to home and daddy, Crown Prince Akihito.
Plans for transforming Britain's betrothed Princess Margaret into plain Mrs. Antony Armstrong-Jones jelled in London. The wedding, to be conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Westminster Abbey on May 6, will be one of the most lavish ever held in England. The BBC pushed on confidently with preparations for a live telecast of the ceremony.
The University of Pittsburgh's Dr. Jonas Salk proved to be as good at sidestepping academic wrangling as he was at subduing the polio virus. Next year he will leave Pittsburgh, where he has recently been at odds with the University's administration, go to San Diego, where he will head the projected Institute for Biological Research, adjoining the University of California's La Jolla campus. The institute will be financed by private sources, will presumably give brilliant, self-contained Jonas Salk the job he wants most: being his own boss.