Change of Scene

Cool-eyed Conchita Cintron, 26, the world's top woman bullfighter got the cold shoulder in Mexico. She flew into Mexico City, ran smack into opposition from the local bullfighters' union: their ring, where she had wrung oles from the crowds eight years ago, was now no place for a woman. Back in 1940, Peru's Conchita had airily remarked that Mexican bulls were passable, but not nearly fierce enough to suit her taste.

Svelte Eve Curie, daughter of Radium Discoverers Pierre and Marie, sister of fellow-traveling Irene, arrived in Manhattan to start an eleven-week lecture tour on France's struggle for civilization (at some $500 a lecture).

Playwright Thornton Wilder, working & playing about Europe since September, arrived in Milan to help in the Italian production of an old play (The Skin of Our Teeth) before starting work on a new one.

Playwright Noel Coward (Private Lives) arrived in Manhattan, took in a few Broadway shows, sailed away for his annual winter sunning in Jamaica.

Princess Elizabeth, 22, came down with a "routine" case of measles, and was quarantined from infant Prince Charles.

Sumner Welles, 56, onetime Under Secretary of State, who almost died after collapsing and lying for some eight hours in a frosty field last Christmas night, was about ready to leave the hospital. Special treatment for severe frostbite (cold packs, whirlpool baths, penicillin shots, drugs) had saved his frozen toes and fingers from amputation.

Franz von Papen, 69, Hitler's super-sleek diplomat, who has served two years of an eight-year rap as a major Nazi offender, was really only a second-class Nazi, a German appeals court decided. A fine of 30,000 marks ($9,000) still stood, and he got a solemn warning not to take part in any activities that might mold public opinion. Then the court ordered the return of his confiscated property and his release from prison.

Badge of Merit

T. S. Eliot, 60, got a nice hand from one of his elders. "I think we all ought to be glad," observed Somerset Maugham, 75, "to have lived long enough to read his poetry."

Princess Margaret took over the job of Commodore of Britain's Sea Rangers (the seagoing Girl Guides), a post her sister held a couple of years ago.

Al Capp, creator of the shmoo, got a double laurel. The National Laugh Foundation named him Cartoonist of the Year; the Yale Record gave him a scroll as 1948's ranking humorist.

Douglas MacArthur and Hirohito shared the same festive day. The general celebrated his 69th birthday, the Emperor his 25th wedding anniversary. Hirohito knocked off work for the day and had a little party; MacArthur stuck to his desk, except for the time it took to slice a cake.

Voice of Experience

Eleanor Holm Rose, now in Panama with her husband on a world tour, revealed an old prejudice. Why had she been ignoring the fine Latin American beaches? Said she: "I have never enjoyed swimming, since Billy made me swim in the Aquacade in the chilly New York May of 1939."

Boredom is the great terror of New Yorkers, concluded France's Jean Cocteau, back in Paris after a three-week visit in Manhattan. "They drink to escape it, they go to the movies, to their psychiatrist, they sit in front of television, there is no conversation," he sighed. "When you walk into a bar in New York, you see a man sitting there eating a meal and looking at television at the same time. The result is, he neither thinks nor eats. I have a great fear eventually such a man will hire someone else to eat his meal for him."

James Curley, 74, mayor of Boston off & on since 1914 (his current term was interrupted in 1947 by a five-month stretch for mail fraud), gave the citizens a thought to mull over. "I want to be mayor of Boston as long as I live," he told a meeting of the city's lesser bosses, "and I have been told I will live to be 125."

William O'Dwyer, mayor of New York since 1946, discussed a requirement of office. Breaking ground for a new bus terminal, he confided to a radio reporter that "I love to shovel . . . Most of my work at City Hall is shoveling."

In Madrid, the glamorous Duchess of Valencia, serving out the tag end of a one-year sentence for attempting to overthrow the Franco government (TIME, Jan. 10), spoke her monarchist mind about her fellow inmates. "They were lower-class people," explained the duchess, "Communists with no interesting ideas." But still, they could appreciate quality when they saw it: "When I left the prison one of the Communists told me: 'If all aristocrats were like you, Duchess, there would be no class struggle.' "

Lady Astor, silent now for some time, spoke up at a London dinner of the Women's Freedom League. The sad state of the world was her subject. "Let us be warned," she cried. "If men could do this to us in the past, what won't they do in the future unless we watch them? . . . Women, we have got to make the world safe for men. They have made it very unsafe for us." The male-bossed press was a major offender: "It doesn't give women enough publicity. Women have got to murder their husbands to get in the papers.

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