"Names make news." Last week the following names made the following news:
Baron Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, husband of Bertha Krupp,* spoke last week in Essen at the unveiling of a monument to the 13 employes of the Krupp Works who were killed by French occupation troops in a 1923 riot. Said he: "Every German should think daily and hourly of this miserable French sanguinary act. What the French did to the Germans cries for vengeance and revenge. How fervently we must hate has been taught us by the French. This hate should be holy to us. It should be handed down as a legacy from generation to generation until that hour when freedom and the fulfillment of the Fatherland's aims have been attained."
Mrs. Alanson Bigelow Houghton,
wife of the U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, on her way to a smart London dinner, stepped from her limousine into an open coal chute, partly disappeared. Helped out, Mrs. Houghton found she had sprained her ankle, went dinnerless back to the embassy.
Anne Nichols, playwright, took the witness stand, last week in Manhattan, in her $3,000,000 suit against the Universal Pictures Corp. for alleged pirating of her play, Abie's Irish Rose, in a Universal movie called The Cohens and the Kellys. Specimen questions & answers:
Q: "Have you ever studied dramatic art?"
Miss Nichols: "No. I just wrote from my heart."
Q: "Are you familiar with contemporary drama?"
Miss Nichols: "I can't say that I am.
Things just come to me and I put them on paper."
Miss Nichols also testified that she had never read Shakespeare, but that she had heard of the character of Shylock. The defense was attempting to show that the theme of Abie's Irish Rose was as old as Shakespeare.
In court, Miss Nichols wore a mink coat and a velvet toque. Abie's Irish Rose has earned for her a personal profit of some $6,000,000. As a movie (Paramount), it is still running in the U. S. As a play, it opened last week in Berlin.
Eugene O'Neill, playwright, big-mystery-man of Shanghai, Honolulu, South Sea Islands, South Pole, Manila, Rapallo, Manhattan, Cape Cod and points north, east, south & west, has confessed and proven that he is none other than himself. It all happened this way. Playwright O'Neill has visited, been rumored to have visited, or said he was going to visit the above places. Actually, he left Shanghai, China, a fortnight ago, when snoops and gossips annoyed him (TIME, Dec. 24). Last week, he turned up in Manila, Philippine Islands, under the name of "The Rev. William O'Brien"; he identified himself by showing a passport and an old account book with entries of royalties from his play Anna Christie.* Said he: "My plays are public, but my life should be private." He hinted that his next destination would be Rapallo, Italy, where he plans to finish a cinema scenario.
His son, Eugene O'Neill Jr., a freshman at Yale, refused to comment on his father's globetrotting.