Homebodies

King Gustaf V of Sweden, 90, ordered by his doctor to stay home, missed the annual dinner of the Swedish Academy for the first time in 74 years. Muttered His Majesty: "Hare-shooting is less fatiguing than attending public banquets."

Humphrey Bogart, of Benedict Canyon, Calif., and wife Lauren Bacall left home unexpectedly for a day's visit with friends. The Bogart boxers had killed a skunk in the backyard, laid it triumphantly on the front doorstep, and then romped joyously through the house.

King Frederik IX of Denmark, 49, made good use of his early naval training during a minor domestic crisis at Amalienborg Palace. When the curtains in the valet's room caught fire, the agile monarch tore downstairs, threw a glass of water on the blaze, then doused it with a bucketful from the kitchen. To an admiring fire squad, he modestly shrugged the whole thing off: "Lucky thing I learned in my youth how to handle a pail of water."

Ingrid Bergman, who has credited her ruddy good health to a liking for "Baltic herrings and sour milk," got the kind of Christmas present that was obviously just what she wanted: a whole barrel of Baltic herrings, a gift from the Swedish fishery union.

Party Boys

Baseball's spindly, high-collared Connie Mack, celebrating his 86th birthday in Philadelphia, blew out a single candle, sliced a 50-lb. cake, offered a generous birthday wish: "I really want to give Philadelphia fans a championship team before my brains wear out."

Joseph Stalin observed his 69th birthday quietly in the Kremlin. The Soviet press and public, obeying instructions, ignored the occasion.

After 36 years in Europe and private U.S. salons, a little-known group portrait of Baritone Titta Ruffo, now 71, the late Tenor Enrico Caruso and the late Basso Feodor Chaliapin turned up in a spot where U.S. opera lovers could get a look at it--the lounge of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. In 1912 fast-painting Portraitist Tade Styka had herded the three together, daubed away between impromptu arias, somehow managed to catch the highstrung trio in a portrait that all but played its own temperamental mood music (see cut).

Duke Ellington was the nation's No. 1 bandleader (for the fifth time), and top soloist (for the first time), according to Down Beat magazine's annual poll. Spike Jones was again King of Corn, nosing out Guy Lombard and Vaughn Monroe.

Trials & Tribulations

J. Parnell Thomas, 53, chairman-in-eclipse of the House Un-American Activities Committee, came down with another attack of gastrointestinal trouble. But he would probably be well enough by Jan. 10 to show up for his trial in federal court in Washington on charges of conspiring to defraud the Government.

Beatrice Lillie, 50, dropped out of Inside U.S.A.--into the hospital with pneumonia.

Composer Dmitri Shostakovich was in Dutch again with his Russian masters. Earlier in the year he had been in the dialectic doghouse, then let out when Pravda praised his "clear, realistic and emotionally powerful music" for the movie Young Guard (TIME, Oct. 25). Now it looked as if Dmitri was back where he started: after thinking it over, the Union of Soviet Composers called a special audition to listen carefully for possible bourgeois discords in his Young Guard music.

In Manhattan, Gerhart Eisler, identified by the House Un-American Activities Committee as the No. 1 U.S. Communist, got suitable recognition from the University of Leipzig, in the Soviet zone: an appointment as professor of a course called "Current Political and Social Issues." Gerhart could go to work as soon as he can get there (he may have to serve a one-year rap, first, if the U.S. Supreme Court upholds his conviction for contempt of Congress).

The U.S. Lawn Tennis Association is a bunch of "doddering old fogies," said Pat Canning Todd, 26, the trigger-tempered net ace who walked out of the French championship semifinals last summer when she was denied the use of the center court. Pat had just been dropped from fourth to sixth place in the national rankings, even though she had beaten two of the girls ranked above her. A committee spokesman retorted with frosty dignity: "We followed the same procedure this year that we have for years."

Sam Goldwyn's troubles with the language were officially immortal. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations had now recorded two of the most celebrated Goldwynisms: "In two words: impossible," and the ever-fresh "Include me out."

Irish Playwright Sean O'Casey (Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars) considered, for the New York Times Book Review, the difficulties of the artistic conscience. "If I wrote less in the way I want to write myself, and more in the way others wish," he said, "I'd be a rich man. I've turned down a number of requests, some of them appeals, to write for the movies; and so I am still a poor devil. Poor but honest, aha."

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