Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
Harry Truman, who once threatened to punch Washington Post Musicritic Paul Hume in the nose after Hume hinted that Daughter Margaret's voice was maybe not operatic, went in for some critic's art himself. Reviewing a record album (The Confederacy, Columbia SL-220, $10) for The Saturday Review, Critic Truman found its songs and readings "excellent." After that, Truman happily digressed to one of his favorite pastimes—a folksy War-Between-the-States history lesson, second-generation style. "When I listened to the record I could see [Confederate General James E.] Jeb Stuart with his plumed hat and redlined cape galloping around [Union General George] McClellan during the Peninsular Campaign . . . the incomparable Robert E. Lee at Fredericksburg . . . Appomattox Court House and Marse Robert's ride to Richmond . . . Then I thought of the terrible Reconstruction and old Thad Stevens and Ben Wade, who wanted Andrew Johnson kicked out so he could be the President."
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Famed Viennese Conductor Erich Kleiber, 64, again learned that totalitarians always prostitute art to political dogma, again quit his job as director of the (East) Berlin State Opera (he first resigned in 1935, in protest against the Nazis), fled with his California-born wife Ruth to West Germany. Immediate reason for his break with the Reds: the inscription across the facade of the opera building, "King Frederick [in dedication to] Apollo and the Muses," had arbitrarily been ordered removed.
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At a ball feting French air cadets in Sweden's university city of Uppsala, Lieut. General Axel Ljungdahl, chief of the Swedish air force, executed some fancy foot maneuvers with the eldest daughter of King Gustaf VI Adolf, glamorous Princess Margaretha, 20, one of Scandinavia's most eligible bachelor girls.
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As one of Britain's top satirists, Stephen Potter, 55, in his puckish tomes on Lifemanship and Gamesmanship, has extolled the advantages of "oneupmanship" , (i.e., the use of the ploy, and the art of getting away with it). As one of Britain's top experts on courtship, Marriage Bureaucrat Heather Jenner, 39, in a recent bestseller called Marriage Is My Business, claims to have arranged some 5,000 successful matings. As a result of indoctrinating her clients with some mystical principles of reciprocal oneupmanship, only three of those matches, testifies Heather, have ended in divorce. Last week, however, a gentleman farmer from Kent, Michael Cox, seemed to have both Spouse Sponsor Jenner (real name: Heather Cox) and Humorist Potter one-down. In a forthright, lifemanly ploy, Farmer Cox sued Heather for divorce on grounds of adultery (uncontested), named Stephen Potter as corespondent.
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