(2 of 2)
Edgar Bergen's daughter, Candace, turned one—and added just the right touch of realism to a birthday-party picture swimming in prinked-&-powdered prettiness. The dewy beauties: Mrs. Kay Kyser (ex-Model Georgia Carroll) & daughter Kimberly, Mrs. Robert Cummings & Robert Jr., Ginny Sinims Dehn & son David, Mrs. Bergen & Candace.
Jane Withers, veteran cinemadolescent, came of age and into legal possession of her $250,000 old homestead—and $125,000 worth of miscellaneous assets. Crooner Tony Martin pleaded guilty to driving 55 in a 25-mile-an-hour zone, got two days in jail. Actress Diana Barrymore and her husband attracted cops with some auto-horn-tooting, got arrested for disorderly conduct and assault & battery (on the cops). Scandals Producer George White, whose car killed a honeymoon couple last July, finished eight months and 16 days of a year's road-camp sentence, went free for good behavior and hard work.
The Literary Life
William Shakespeare got a setback in Haverhill, Mass. Off the high schools' required reading list went The Merchant of Venice, for its "distortion of Jewish attitudes and conduct."
Robert Lowell, 29, looked like the year's most rewarded poet. Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship ($2,500) last month, and a Pulitzer Prize ($500) last week, he now got a $1,000 fellowship from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts & Letters.*
Novelist Evelyn Waugh, resettled in Britain after a lush six-week stay in Hollywood (TIME, March 31), gave readers of the London Daily Telegraph the real Hollywood lowdown. On the cinemazation of literature: "Each of the books purchased has had some individual quality, good or bad, that has made it remarkable. It is the work of a staff of 'writers' to distinguish this quality, separate it and obliterate it."
* This put him in a class with the late Margaret Tobin Brown, socially ambitious wife of a Denver miner, who survived the Titanic disaster, was thereafter known to Denverites as "the unsinkable Mrs. Brown."
* Not to be confused with the National Cotton Council's Maid of Cotton, or Memphis' Cotton Carnival Queen, or Massachusetts' Cotton Mather.
* All of which probably compensated for Columnist Franklin Pierce Adams' published declaration that neither he nor New Yorker Critic Hamilton Basso had ever heard of Lowell's prizewinning book, Lord Weary's Castle (TIME, Dec. 16).