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"Funny I couldn't say je t'aime et je t'adore as I longed to," the First Lady wrote after one meeting. "But always remember I am saying it, that I go to sleep thinking of you." From Hickok, in December 1933: "Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of reassuring smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips."
Family and friends deny a lesbian relationship. "Remember," insists Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., "my mother was brought up in an era when children read the Brontes and Jane Austen, and they adapted that effusive style of writing."
Not even the finest white house in Henning, Term. (pop. 550), had a library and a music room 50 years ago, but that house did—and a porte-cochere to boot. And when Bertha Palmer, daughter of prosperous black Lumber Merchant W.E. Palmer, sat down at the piano on Saturday afternoons to play and sing, black and white alike gathered on the lawn to listen. Author Alex Haley remembers it well. Bertha Palmer was his mother. In the white frame house, Haley heard from Grandmother Cynthia Palmer the family history that germinated into Roots. Haley, 58, has now purchased the abandoned house, which had become a target for vandals. He has also established a maintenance fund for nearby Bethlehem Cemetery, where his forebears lie, even unto the memorable Chicken George, who took the family out of North Carolina to Tennessee after the Civil War.
"Sandy," she asked idly one day in 1946, "why haven't you made my bed?" Free-living Peggy Guggenheim was coaxing Sculptor Alexander Calder to create a unique bed head for her. Calder finally did, in solid silver, and Guggenheim, now 81 and mostly bedridden at her Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, can glance up at it as she contemplates the years. The New York heiress who became a patron of the modern art movement has worked her contemplations into memoir, Out of this Century; Confessions of an Art Addict (Universe Books; $17.50). The book is largely a catalogue of both art and artists Guggenheim unabashedly collected beginning in 1923. There was Marcel Duchamp; when they finally went to bed, "after 20 years [of friendship], it was almost like incest." Max Ernst advanced from lover to second husband, but "marriage did not stop our rows as I had hoped." Guggenheim also acquired writers; Samuel Beckett "came and went and always brought champagne to bed."
It was not anything John Connally said at a luncheon tendered the Republican presidential aspirant by NBC that stuck in John Chancellor's throat. Rather, the network's evening anchorman suddenly choked on Gouda cheese. "He turned very red and then very gray," recalled Today show Host Tom Brokaw. "That's when I knew I had to help him." Brokaw helped with the Heimlich maneuver for choke victims that had been demonstrated on his show. He embraced his gasping colleague from behind, knotted a fist into Chancellor's stomach and pulled the fist. Out popped the Gouda. Five hours later, Chancellor was on the air as though nothing had happened.