Native Customs

Earthy Novelist Erskine (Tobacco Road) Caldwell flew back from a two month junket on which he tried to use up some of his frozen royalties in twelve European countries. He liked Italy best, but thought the natives were getting fed up with U.S. visitors. Reported Caldwell: Rome is so overrun with the Hollywood crowd that street peddlers who sidle up to tourists with furtive propositions no longer peddle postcards or addresses. Now they whisper: "I've got a script."

Cinemogul Darryl Zanuck, off to the Riviera, looked forward to some hobnobbing with the international set. "I like them," he told a columnist. "They don't talk show business ... In fact, most of them never saw a movie and think a movie is something you see through a peep glass after you put a dime in the slot."

In Israel, a British legation official dropped in to visit Dr. Chaim Weizmann, chatted pleasantly and left after a while with a signed paper that finally relieved Israel's President of his British citizenship.

At a London luncheon in her honor, Marlene Dietrich forgot that one does not smoke in a formal dining room until the King has been toasted. Between courses, she puffed on a green cigarette holder while the traditional uniformed toastmaster stared in horror. When he could stand it no longer, he banged his gavel close to Marlene's fingers, called for the toast, then roared pointedly: "Ladies & Gentlemen, you may now smoke!" Marlene spluttered, reddened, hid her head and finally apologized.

The Archbishop of Canterbury wagged a stern finger at politicians. "Stick to the sober truth in speeches," he advised. "The temptation at election times is to overstate or even misstate the case . . ." He frowned on political talks which use quotations from the New Testament, "especially the words of Our Lord." Chances are that "words will be misapplied and their spiritual meaning distorted. In any case, there is the suggestion of trying to turn Scripture to party uses."

Grand Dragon Dr. Samuel J. Green of the Ku Klux Klan gave an interview for The Nation to Negro Journalist Roi Ottley, who told Green that scientific thought and world opinion ran counter to the theory of Negro inferiority. Insisted Green: "I'm still livin' in Georgia, no matter what the world and science thinks." Why, asked Ottley, do Klansmen wear disguises? Explained the Grand Dragon: "So many people are prejudiced against the Klan these days . . ."

New Directions

Basso Ezio Pinza, a Broadway matinee idol at 57 (in South Pacific), made a new conquest. He signed a three-year $500,000 contract with MGM, starting next June and giving him a chance to star in both musicals and straight dramatic movies.

Winston Churchill seemed about to take a flyer. For the first time, he registered racing colors with Britain's Jockey Club--the required preliminary to racing one's own horses. The Churchill colors: chocolate, with pink sleeves and cap.

At a crowded Paris race track, newlywed Rita Hayworth tottered in a faint and, almost before her friend Elsa Maxwell could whisk her out of the crowds, excitable French newspapers twittered a diagnosis: expectant motherhood. Rita and her Prince Aly Khan offered no diagnosis at all.

The Met's pin-up girl, Soprano Patrice Munsel, 24, struck an old pose (see cut) and dived into a new project: she will spend the summer learning German roles, to round out a repertory that includes the French and Italian.

In a Munich denazification court, Photographer Heinrich Hoffman, who brought Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun together, testified that the Fiihrer's relations with Eva were platonic to the end. Said Hoffman: "Eva never was alone when she met Herr Hitler in the evening. In this respect, Herr Hitler was very infantile."

Honor Bound

Among the winners of the third annual Horatio Alger Award, as outstanding symbols "of starting from scratch": television's Dr. Allen B. Du Mont and Used Car Magnate Earl W. ("Madman") Muntz.

In Eminence, Ky., Theater Owner Arey Miles pushed a campaign to improve the unmarked grave of Cinemaster David W. Griffith, who died last year. Collected so far, from three exhibitors: $15.

In France, patriots put up two monuments to General George S. Patton, and movie-goers elected Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peclc as the best foreign screen performers of 1948.

Cinema Director Billy Wilder reported a bit of dialogue between himself and veteran cinemactor Erich ("The Man You Love to Hate") von Stroheim. Said Wilder: "It is an honor to direct you. You were ten years ahead of your time." Responded Von Stroheim: "No, 20 years."

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