The Philosophic Mind

"So long as I am working," said New York City's William O'Dwyer, describing how it felt to be Mayor, "it's about the same as being a grocery clerk. I haven't the time to realize the drama of the situation. But when I am by myself ... I get a funny feeling up and down my spine. . . ."

"To me," George Bernard Shaw told an interviewer for a spiritualist journal, "belief in individual survival is horror. To realize that, think not of your own individual survival but of mine. . . . Could you bear it?" He used to go to seances, said Shaw, but he never gets invited any more. He always cheated at them, he explained.

"Jitterbug," declared veteran composer Sigmund Romberg (Student Prince,Blossom Time), "is the healthiest kind of exercise. There's no sex in it like those 'lights low' dances after the last war. But I predict its eventual demise. . . ."

Entrances & Exits

Lady Diana Duff Cooper, willowy wife of Britain's Ambassador to France and once "The Most Beautiful Woman in England," was right in there with Greta Garbo, who got left $20,000 by a hermit last month. Lady Diana was left a fortune by a lovelorn Spanish grandee who had set eyes on her only twice. Big-nosed, big-mustached Count Manuel Antonio de Luzarraga saw her at a London ball more than 20 years ago; 15 years later he saw her again on the street. He had brightened the years between by writing her anonymous love letters. Scotland Yard tried to force him out of Britain in 1922, but the Count wouldn't force. He just went on writing, but now signed his name. When he wrote his will, he left Lady Diana everything he had in two banks in England and Switzerland, where he died. It added up to more than $100,000. But the Count was still being defeated. "I have been assured," said Lady Diana last week, "that because of ... claims on the estate I would receive nothing."

Nancy Oakes de Marigny, whom tragedy once made a brightly lit public figure, made a photogenic reappearance (see cut) in happier circumstances. Occasion: a whopping coming-out party for sister Shirley. Scene: Nassau in the Bahamas, where wealthy Sir Harry Oakes, the girls' father, was mysteriously murdered in 1943. Out of the picture: Nancy's estranged husband, Playboy Count Alfred de Marigny (who was charged with the murder but acquitted), last heard from in Canada, where he wrote his amatory memoirs (TIME, April 22).

Diana Roosevelt had a part-time career as a public servant around Washington. Diana, daughter of Eleanor's late brother Hall, and a sophomore at George Washington University, hustled hash in a coke-&-hamburger joint.

Randolph Churchill, lecturing son of Winston, was still lecturing in the U.S. after six months, but backed out of a Manhattan radio date this week. Said Randolph: when he agreed to criticize Communist Earl Browder's new book (War or Peace with Russia?) on the air, he hadn't realized "that an American Communist would also be taking part. ... I have long made it a rule to have no association whatever with American, Canadian, or British Communists." The American Communist who would take part: expelled Comrade Browder.

Guided Tours

The sporty international set was on the move again.

Archduke George Salvator of the peripatetic Habsburgs, and his Archduchess, Marie Valerie (granddaughter of the late Emperor Francis Joseph), faced a quick journey out of Austria. The Minister of the Interior absolutely insisted on it. The couple lacked proper papers, said the Minister, and "could not document their Austrian nationality."

Charles ("Lucky") Luciano, deported from Cuba at the urging of the U.S. (TIME, March 3), was still aboard as his ship neared Italy. The onetime overlord of Manhattan's brothels refrained from jumping ship in the Canary Islands--possibly due to a professional inhibition (in underworld slang, a "canary" is a squealer).

In Nice arrived pith-helmeted Son-Ngoc-Thanh, stocky ex-premier of Cambodia. At home he had left his two wives and seven children. He was on the Riviera to stay. France, which had given him a life term at hard labor for being a quisling, next commuted the sentence to exile on the Riviera at France's expense. Son-Ngoc-Thanh at once unlimbered an observation on the natives: "French people are magnanimous."

Raymond Duncan, 72-year-old, sandal-shod, chlamys-clad brother of the late Dancer Isadora, finally steamed back to Paris from his first U.S. visit in 15 years. Raymond, who binds his long hair in a fillet and would look right with a shepherd's crook, carried instead a ten-foot flagpole--a gift, he said. He would set it up right in front of his house. His parting words: "I find . . . that New York is a little slow. The people seem to be in the waiting room, waiting for something." He didn't say what.

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