Hollywood's blonde Virginia Mayo,

who has been working at being an actress, got a not-so-helping hand from Stars & Stripes: election as Miss Cheesecake of 1948.

Veteran Cinemactor Charles Boyer, now breaking in on Broadway in Red Gloves, was made a Knight of the French Legion of Honor, for founding in Los Angeles a nonprofit cultural institution dedicated to French-American friendship.

Bing Crosby, 44, was named the nation's No. 1 box-office draw, for the fifth straight year, by Motion Picture Herald. Runner-up: Betty Grable. No. 3: Abbott & Costello.

To the kids of America, the most familiar face in public life is the craggy jaw of Dick Tracy, identified by 97% of the moppets who were interviewed by the Ladies' Home Journal. Bing Crosby was spotted by 95%, while 93% recognized Harry Truman.

The Solid Flesh

Ann Sheridan, 33, in London on location for her latest, Was a Male War Bride, took to her bed with a bad cold which rapidly developed into pleurisy.

Albert Einstein, 69, checked into a Brooklyn hospital for an operation to fix up a "longstanding abdominal condition." After an hour on the table, he came out in "satisfactory" condition.

Sumner Welles, 56, found unconscious in a Maryland neighbor's frosty field last week, was coming along fine too: doctors now doubted that his frozen toes would have to be amputated.

George VI was feeling better, too. This week he and Queen Elizabeth planned to go down to their place at Sandringham, hoping that the country air would be good for his ailing leg.

Daughter Elizabeth was also feeling fine. Chipper in mink and taffeta, she showed up at a BBC show, looking every inch the serene and happy matron (see cut), in her first public appearance since the baby came.

General Peyton C. March, bearded Army Chief of Staff in World War I, reached a spry 84 in Washington, passed up his usual birthday press conference to spend the whole day with the four generations of his family who came to call.

Faye Emerson Roosevelt was recovering nicely from a minor razor gash on her wrist (eight stitches were taken, but only for what her doc Lor called "esthetic" reasons) and a major attack of tabloid headlines. After the first front-page flurries about an attempt at suicide had subsided, she and Elliott told their story: she had really cut her wrist accidentally while reaching for some aspirin.

Cinemermaid Esther Williams announced that she would retire temporarily: she and husband Ben Gage were expecting their first child in August.

The Calloused Hand

Johnny Weissmuller, 43, for 17 years the screen's ranking Tarzan, conceded to his middle-aging middle, shed his breechclout for a bush-jacket in a new movie called Jungle Jim.

Winston Churchill arrived in Cannes for three weeks on the Riviera. He planned to put in some hard work on the third installment of his memoirs (the second is due for publication next month)--with time out for a little painting and a rest.

Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler's financial expert, who has been cleared by one denazification court but is wanted by another, had made good use of his jail time (ten months during the Nuernberg trials). He had dashed off the libretto for an operetta, he admitted, about the love of a G.I. for a fraulein: "As I had no possibility . . . to do scientific work--lacking books and papers--I wrote it for my personal distraction."

Sessue Hayalcawa, 59, Oriental cine-menace of the Pearl White era, stopped off in Manhattan on his way back to Hollywood after ten years in France. Trapped in France by the war, he had managed to live during the occupation by going to work at a boyhood hobby: painting Japanese watercolors with a hair brush on silk. Playing the slant-eyed heavy once again, his first movie job would be a "five days' fist fight with Humphrey Bogart."

The estate of the late George Leonard Berry, onetime U.S. Senator from Tennessee and for 41 years president and absolute boss of the A.F.L.'s Pressmen's Union, was estimated at $750,000--the largest ever left by a U.S. labor leader.

Inside Sources

Novelist Evelyn (The Loved One) Waugh, 45, described by the raffish New York Daily. News as resembling "an indignant White Leghorn," told the British press: "It is almost impossible for a man to live the good life in the U.S. They heat their rooms to 75DEG, then they nail the windows down so that you suffocate. They have colored bubble gum. Their radios are on all day. And they talk too much." But Evelyn was shortly to subject himself once more to all this--for a series of U.S. lectures at $440 a talk.

France's self-conscious Jack-of-Arts Jean Cocteau, 59, flew in from Paris for the U.S. opening of his new movie, Eagle with Two Heads, and the opening of his first Manhattan one-man art show. A bird of a man in black tie and glittering black moccasins, Surrealist Cocteau pondered his drawings which were on exhibition (carefree unicorns and nudes, sketched with sticks of wood and watered ink on wide pieces of paper) and explained his methods. "Picasso told me to use whatever I found at home. Then I wouldn't get the idea that what I did was valuable." Cocteau also wished people would stop worrying about the "terrible state" of France:

"Actually France is much as it always was. A friend of mine who is a historian told me that France had never been tranquil except for the first five years of the reign of Louis XIV. So please stop shaking your head about France. We are anarchists by nature--conservative anarchists, that is."

Arthur Capper, 83, marked his voluntary retirement at the end of 30 years in the U.S. Senate with a nostalgic radio talk to his onetime Kansas constituents: "I can still hear the orations delivered in the Senate chamber by William E. Borah of Idaho and Jim Reed of Missouri; the masterful address of Winston Churchill and the matchless eloquence of Mme. Chiang Kaishek. And," recalled the veteran dry, "there was Carry Nation and her hatchet. If I had time, I would tell you the part I played in getting Carry and her hatchet to come to Topeka, and the trail of broken glassware and discouraged bartenders she left in her wake."

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