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When I have a highball or two I tell the truth about things. The truth, as you continually show in your pages, is tough. It is not then so much my talk that is tough as the stuff it deals with. But I'm not the town drunk. With the reputation you give me I'll be expected to drink everybody in Kansas City under the table and I can't do it--not me. THOMAS H. BENTON Kansas City
Said TIME: "Tom Benton, who does know how to drink..." No town drunk does. --Ed.
NOV. 10, 1947
...I was impressed...by the manner in which the details of my career were gleaned from all parts of the country in a few weeks' time and so effectively pressed into a capsule of four pages. The next time I want to cut a show, I'll call you all in... OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN 2ND New York City
NOV. 8, 1948
It has come to my attention that in your Current & Choice section, Lauren Bacall has consistently been left out of the cast of Key Largo. Inasmuch as there are those of us in Hollywood, Miss Bacall among them, who would rather make Current & Choice than win an Academy Award or make Men of Distinction, won't you please include her in the cast of Key Largo in Current & Choice just once, as she is my wife and I have to live with her. Miss Bacall is extremely tired of being labeled et al. HUMPHREY BOGART Beverly Hills, Calif.
JAN. 17, 1949
I didn't know I had been hired and fired by Theatre Arts until I read about it in TIME. What else has been happening to me lately that I ought to know about? WILLIAM SAROYAN New York City
TIME regrets that it is fresh out of Saroyan news. All that the present editor [Charles MacArthur] of Theatre Arts knows about this crisis in American letters is that it occurred while he was in Europe and that he remains as ever Mr. Saroyan's most faithful fan. --Ed.
AUG. 17, 1953
...I am happy that Eleanor Steber had such a wonderful success in Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten...I remember...exhausting rehearsals with Richard Strauss...I went to his home in Garmisch--he studied the part of the [dyer's] wife with me.
He really was a very simple family man, entirely devoted to his temperamental wife--he was really a henpecked husband...I sang a lot of his lieder, and often his wife Pauline would listen. Some of the lieder seemed to bring back happy memories to them both, and Pauline would run to him, throwing her arms around him, saying with big sobs of touching sentimentality, "Do you remember, Richard?"--and he would have tears in his eyes, too. They were a strange couple. They fought like mad--needless to say, Pauline always started the fights...He said to me when I departed: "You have seen a lot which you will find strange in this house. But believe me, all the praises in the world are not so refreshing as my wife's outbreaks of temperament."
He was so accustomed to meeting people who adored him, bowed before him in reverence. He did not like it; he was a thoroughly straightforward man--and his Pauline was like a draft of fresh water... LOTTE LEHMANN Santa Barbara, Calif.
AUG. 30, 1954