House & Garden Harry S. Truman received a gift from the James F. Byrneses: a double portrait, in oil, by Grace Annette Du Pre, of himself and his 93-year-old mother. Another recent portrait of her already hung in his second-floor study.

Juan Peron's wife Eva went shopping in Buenos Aires for a new carpet for the presidential nest, picked up one for $30,000.

Andrei Gromyko, who has been penned up in the Plaza on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, got hold of a country place on the plushy north shore of Long Island.* The main diggings (in old Woodbury): a Georgian brick pile with a nice third floor for servants, a five-car garage, landscaped grounds. Neighbors: Wall Streeter Henry Rogers Winthrop and Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. Landlady: Mrs. Ogden L. Mills, widow of the ex-Secretary of the Treasury.

Explosions

Victor Moore, who recently tried to give his dog a romp and got fined for unleashing it in Manhattan's Central Park (TIME, May 27), tried to go fishing and walked into an explosion. At Greenport, L.I., the portly comedian and Son Robert were tuning up the engines of their cabin cruiser when something exploded. Results: Son Robert, arm and leg burns; Victor, a scratched thumb and little finger, singed hair and eyebrows.

Martha Taft, the Senator's wife, sailed into a meeting of Republican women in Philadelphia with a bouquet of raspish phrases. After referring to "delirium Trumans" and observing that "to err is Truman" (both times neglecting to credit the phrases to Gossipist Walter Winchell, who shortly set the record straight), she widened her traverse and characterized the Democratic Party: "a freak of nature . . . with a Communist front, a reactionary rear, and a know-nothing middle."

Mabel Dodge Luhan, arty salon keeper and tireless tell-all (Intimate Memories, et al.), broke out in glittery Town & Country: "I am going to tell you some things about grandmothers. I am one. . . . Their day is over. . . . Nobody wants them. . . . What are they to do?" Simple: they should "love more rather than less as time goes on . . . It is a solution for me, so why cannot it be for others . . . ? I am having a fine time loving people. . . . Sexagenarian Luhan has been married four times--currently to Taos Indian Tony Luhan.

Henry L Mencken, 65, lord high lambaster of the '20s, had a visit from Columnist Ward Morehouse and impersonated his old self. Nostalgic excerpts from the interview: "People are in a state of imbecility. The country is a wreck. . . . The United Nations has no more chance than the Ku Klux Klan would have in the Vatican. ..."

Art & Beauty

Queen Elizabeth in the black silk robes of a barrister (she rated them as an honorary bencher of the Middle Temple) looked moderately Portia-like, completely queenly, in a portrait by James Gunn. She gazed with perfect aplomb at visitors to the Royal Academy's summer show in London; later, barristers would gaze back at her, permanently on a Middle Temple wall.

Princess Elizabeth was undergoing alterations. The puffs and frills of girlhood were giving way to simpler, more sophisticated (and more slimming) styles; and Designer Norman Hartnell--still mama's dressmaker--was giving way to Molyneux, the very smart Duchess of Kent's stylist.

Mr. America of 1946 was discovered by the judges at the A.A.U.'s national weight-lifting tournament to be an ex-sailor named Alan Stephan. He came from Cicero, Ill. and looked like a collaboration between Rome's Michelangelo, Paris' Rodin and Manhattan's Bernarr MacFadden.

Joe Louis' right fist, in plaster, became a Manhattan museum piece. The American Museum of Natural History added it to its comparative anatomy collection.

Drew Pearson, brash, breathless, and sometimes knowing Washington columnist, wearing a smile for the photographer and getting a kiss from bridal-veiled Daughter Ellen (as Thurman Arnold's son George, the groom, stood by), beautified a Woodbury beauty soap ad.

Passing Marks

Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia University's president emeritus, now 84 and blind, took no active part in the Commencement exercises for the first time in more than 40 years. Photographed in his new role of bystander, he was a study in dignity and academic majesty.

Bess Truman proved to have been concealing an old aptitude. The Kansas City Star plucked an item out of its files, repeated the news 40 years after. At the annual field day at Miss Barstow's School, Bessie Wallace (Truman) had placed third in the shot put.

John Harvard's latter-day sons suddenly included a fine collection of highly polished brass. Honorary LL.D.s went to: General Henry H. Arnold, General Alexander A. Vandegrift, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Generals George C. Marshall and Douglas MacArthur (in absentia). John had it just about covered.

General Joseph T. McNarney was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Bath by George VI at Buckingham Palace.

Admiral Ernest J. King, wartime commander of the Pacific Fleet, was accepted into the Al Koran lodge of the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine in Cleveland.

Grace Moore, bubbly blonde operatic soprano, was back from a European tour. Laryngitis had forced her to skip a concert at London's Albert Hall, and she had a fine prima-donna tribute for the audience. "The audience was simply marvelous," she said, "accepting my apologies and listening instead to Marjorie Lawrence."

Love in Los Angeles

James M. Cain, 53, cold blood-&-thunder novelist whose second wife complained he once threw her clear across the room, was sued for divorce by Wife No. 3 --oldtime cinema siren Aileen Pringle, 45, who had lasted almost two years with him. The charge: cruelty.

Jay Gould III, 26, great-grandson of the late railroad tycoon, still had a wife. Jennifer Bruce Gould, 21, daughter of Cinemactor Nigel Bruce, was refused a divorce by a Los Angeles judge who judged her complaints insufficient. Some of them: Husband Jay wouldn't let her dance or play tennis with anybody but him, didn't like her theatrical friends, demanded full-fashioned meals, and was too demonstrative in his public lovemaking.

*The Soviet Purchasing Commission already has two mansions in Glen Cove, one of them on the old J. P. Morgan estate.

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