Love & Kisses

The tone was set by U.S. Delegate Arthur Vandenberg. "Senor Presidente y amigos," he began (after that he relapsed into English). Before the session was over, Argentine Delegate Pascual La Rosa strode clear across the Quitandinha's salmon-pink conference salon to hug the Senator in a warm Latin abrazo. The latest U.S.-Argentine dispute had dissolved in love & kisses. The tracks were cleared for the signing of the Inter-American Defense Treaty when President Truman reaches Rio this week (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

Day & Night. George Marshall had got the treaty he wanted: one-third of the world's nations (and Canada if it liked) would bind themselves to resist attack against any one of them, whether by an outside country or by a member republic. Again & again the Argentines had given in on committee disputes. Sharp, thin Foreign Minister Juan A. Bramuglia, sipping mate from a gourd in his Suite 400, had reined in his delegates. His orders flashed by day and by night. An Argentine delegate skidding down the fourth-floor corridor in his shorts to respond to a late-night summons nearly bowled over a startled female. "That's being descamisado with a vengeance," she said.

Delegates were far more likely to forget their conference disputes than the fantastic Babylon-in-Brazil in which their sessions had been held. The Swiss-styled Quitandinha Hotel sits in a fogbound mountain valley with little to see but man-made pools, lawns, terraces and a horse ring. Syrup-slow dining-room service had queered routine entertaining. Bar prices ($2.45 for a Scotch) dried up most sociable drinking. Griped Ecuador's Foreign Minister Jose Trujillo, worried about his bills after a revolution at home: "It costs $64 a day to live; it costs extra to laugh." Some delegates had derived their chief pleasure from watching (no admission charge) a red-white-&-blue ping-pong ball dancing atop a single-jet fountain in the hotel's vast (500-ft.-long) main corridor.

Chicken & Cake. Last week, this monotony dissolved in a round of official parties. Brazil's Foreign Minister, Conference Chairman Raul Fernandes, gave a dinner and a buffet extravaganza for 1,000 in the Quitandinha's Dom Pedro I room. Guests had chicken, lobster, 20 kinds of cake, 168 bottles of Scotch, and watched Brazilian women curtsy to Dom Pedro III, pretender to Brazil's non-existent throne (the party's cost: $5,000). This week, with party after party set for the Truman visit, delegates' wives would have no more time for bridge and letter-writing. After three dull weeks, the gaudy ex-gambling palace in the valley of fog was finally coming into its own.

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