Movers & Shakers

In the world of letters, Harry S. Truman and Edmund Wilson each had his hour of triumph, such as it was.

The President was informed by letter that he had been chosen an honorary editor of the Harvard Crimson, campus newspaper. When the Crimson got a formal acknowledgement from the White House, it had to respond with some sad news: somebody had just been hoaxing the President--Crimson rules forbade honorary editors.

To balding Scholar Wilson came one of those attentions he never got in the cloistered days before his Memoirs of Hecate County was banned. His fourth and current wife, Elena, was nominated by a group of magazine artists one of the Ten Most Glamorous Women of 1946.

Sinclair Lewis, whose last try at movie writing was an anti-fascist horse opera (junked as "bad box office"), was back for another try--this time a satire on Adam & Eve. Two days after he hit Hollywood, Babbitt's aging creator: 1) went to a big party at Gossipist Hedda Hopper's, 2) talked like a native. "The movies are no more commercial," declared Lewis, "than any other form of art. . . . There's no reason to suppose that a poor man starving in a garret writes better than a rich man living in a mansion. . . . Human beings are 100% commercial as hell. . . . Rembrandt was one of the most commercial bastards that ever lived."

In Manhattan, lean, bemonocled Visitor Sax Rohmer, who had been chiefly concerned with Fu Manchu for the past 30 years, listened with professional interest to Soprano Mimi Benzell. She would sing in a new operetta, Chinese Nightingale--new book & lyrics by Sax Rohmer. The show would open in London, but Briton

Rohmer would not stay there. "I shall spend most of my time in the south of France," said he. "It's much more pleasant there. Conditions in England are shocking, just shocking."

Bound home from France after an eight-month visit was best-seller Richard Wright (Black Boy, Native Son); but he was going back again in the spring. "America is not the New World," wrote the Negro novelist in a Parisian journal, "because the social elements in the States are among the oldest . . . whereas Europe has abandoned the ancient structure. . . . Thus, France and Europe should be considered the New World."

George Bernard Shaw, for a change, was in print with an utterance that had nothing to do with mankind's folly. The New Statesman and Nation had got hold of an old note he had sent (apparently with a picture) to the late Actress Ellen Terry, with whom he carried on a safely epistolary "love-affair" for 30 years:

This scene which would a stone unharden Is but the view from Bernard's garden. Here, standing sideways to the dawn, And looking northwards up the lawn, You see the house that Bernard weeps in Because his Ellen never peeps in.

Hedy Lamarr, who wants to break a picture contract with Producer Arnold Pressburger because she expects a baby in March, lost a court fight to have her case heard before the baby arrives. "Miss Lamarr's condition," gravely deposed the producer, "came about not through any fault of my own, but due entirely to an act on the part of the plaintiff which was solely within the plaintiff's own control."

Ingrid Bergman, who has won several prizes herself, won one for Photographer Charles Welbourne by managing to look like a woman who could never understand Ingrid Bergman (see cut). The International Society of Photographic Arts voted the print the Most Provocative Motion Picture Still of 1946.

Too late for this Christmas but worth saving for next was a news photo of Denmark's Princesses Margrethe and Benedilcte* in costume, prizeworthy in any man's Christmas card division (see cut).

Among the week's most confusing performers were Singers Nelson Eddy and Lauritz Melchior.

The ingenuities of recordmaking produced an album of Hymns We Love, sung by a quartet--all the voices Singer Eddy's, which made those people who like him four times as happy.

Opera's Melchior said he would probably never sing opera in Boston again, "because . . . Boston would not allow German opera to be given here during the war." He said it was "nothing personal . . . simply a principle ... I believe that art has nothing to do with politics." Three nights later Tenor Melchior sang in concert in Boston, where the Met had given three Wagnerian operas in 1945 and Melchior had sung two in 1942.

It was no week for the fainthearted. Donald R. Richberg, onetime NRA brain-truster, rose in Philadelphia to warn the nation that unless labor was put in its place, the U.S. would be driven "deeper & deeper into a political war which may become a civil war." And Bandleader Art Mooney, pondering what he had seen from the bandstand, reported that wild dancing to hot music was ruining the shapes of American girls. He noted their "piano legs, wide bottoms, thick waists, and hefty bosoms," feared an even uglier future.

But American womanhood got a kind word from Visitor Maria Romano de Gasperi, 23-year-old daughter of Italy's visiting Premier. She had thought the girls who came to Italy--"so nice, so full of life"--were exceptions; now she found that "these qualities are peculiar to all American women." She also admired their clothes. "But I think," she added, "that American women look better when they wear sport clothes than when they try to look sophisticated."

To dress well the men had only to listen to Hollywood's Adolphe Menjou, fashion plate since the days of the silent cinema. He offered instructions. Among them: let the jacket sleeves be narrow, and the shirt cuff showing; never wear a striped shirt with a striped suit; wear suspenders instead of a belt; let the knot of the tie be loose instead of tight; let the trousers break just over the instep; stay away from jewelry. "The well-dressed man," certified the famously high-styled actor, "is never conspicuous."

Success formula of the week came from Georgia's umbrageous Dan Duke, outgoing Assistant Attorney General. Defeated by "white supremacy" champions, Duke let go from the bitter corner of his mouth with ten rules for success in Georgia politics:

"Look out for your own interests.

"Honor nobody but yourself.

"Do evil, but pretend to do good.

"Be miserly.

"Covet and get what you can.

"Be brutal.

"Cheat whenever you get a chance.

"Kill your enemies and, if necessary, your friends.

"Utilize your spare time in devising ways to fool people.

"Never agree to any clear statement of facts. Jumble them so you will have a hole to jump through."

* Daughters of Crown Prince Frederik, but under laws of the Danish Royal House they are barred from the throne.

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