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Slap-happy radio & cinema Comic Red Skelton announced from Hollywood that he had signed a new seven-year contract with Sponsor Procter & Gamble to peddle his wares on television, too. His salary for radio & TV antics: "Nearly $1,000,000 a year."
Marlene Dietrich, now in Hollywood making a Technicolored western epic, left the cameras long enough to join a press party in memory of her arrival from Germany 21 years ago. Her daughter, 26, now a Manhattan television actress, and a third of the original 68 reporters who covered her first press conference gathered to sip champagne with the screen's most famous grandmother, who admitted that she simply could not remember anything about the original conference. Said she: "I've forgotten it all. Wouldn't you, after 21 years?"
Contralto Marian Anderson, on a Latin American concert tour, charmed her audience in San Juan, was in turn charmed by a "quiet and pleasant" luncheon with Puerto Rico's Governor Luis Muñoz Marín. Later, dining at the Bankers Club, she applauded the chef's art by ordering two double helpings of his specialty: Cabrito Estofado, a goat stew highly seasoned with laurel leaves, capers, olives, almonds, wine and raisins.
When Cambridge, Mass, police stepped in and called a moral halt to a showing of Hedy Lamarr's provocative old "art" film Ecstasy, some 800 outraged M.I.T. students engineered a near riot of protest, booed the cops, tossed a sodium bomb against the side of President James Killian's house, and, in a final petulant gesture, draped a Communist flag from the freshman dormitory.
The Golden West
The Society of American Florists (and pressagent) decided that Mrs. Benjamin Gage, Hollywood housewife and mother of two (better known to cinema audiences as Swimming Star Esther Williams), "embodies everything that is typical of the Young American Mother," sent her a huge bunch of American Beauty roses and named her "Queen of Mother's Day — 1951."
In Hollywood, fancy-frilled Tennis Star Gertrude ("Gorgeous Gussie") Moran admitted that her off-again-on-again plans to marry Gloria Vanderbilt's ex-husband Pat Di Cicco were off for good. "When a man and a woman go around together," she explained, "there comes a time when they should get married. If they go past it, a wedding would be ridiculous. Pat and I passed that time quite a while ago." On the other hand, she sighed, one seldom meets eligible men in the "tennis racket." "Oh, you usually find a gang of men waiting when you finish a match, but they're all such jerks."
Anita Loos, talking over her new book, A Mouse Is Born, with New York Times Book Columnist Harvey Breit, expounded on another art form. Said Author Loos: "I'm the oldest motion picture writer in the business. I am endlessly grateful to the movies, and I'll tell you why. Because a writer can always make a living writing for the movies when he hasn't anything to say. If it hadn't been for the movies, I would have had to turn out novels when I had nothing to say . . . You can do a good job on other people's material . . . The movies help writers over their bad periods."