The Common Touch

It was a busy week of social whirling for Britain's royal family. One evening Princess Margaret took 24 friends nightclubbing (see Music). On another evening King George, Queen Elizabeth and their two daughters went to the movies: a special performance of That Forsyte Woman at the Odeon, about which 5,000 celebrity hunters swirled and gawked. On an evening at home (Buckingham Palace), the King and Queen gave a little party (250 guests) for Princess Elizabeth before she flew to Malta to spend her second wedding anniversary with Prince Philip, who is on duty with the fleet. The band at the party obligingly played request numbers for the Queen (Baby, It's Cold Outside) and for the King (Always True to You in My Fashion).

Spry King Gustaf of Sweden, 91, and his brothers, Prince Oscar Bernadotte, 90, and Prince Carl, 88, threw caution to the winds at a birthday party for Oscar in Stockholm's Drottningholm Castle. Abandoning their rigid spartan diet, they gorged themselves on a few favorite dishes of their youth: lobster American, goose liver, partridge, champagne, ice cream.

Handsome, auto-racing Prince Rainier III, 26, mounted the throne of the 370-acre kingdom of Monaco, which recently installed dice tables in its Monte Carlo casino to shake more dollars out of crap-shooting Americans. The youthful bachelor ruler succeeded his grandfather, Louis II, who died last May.

The Duchess of Windsor divulged to the readers of Vogue that the life of a brilliant international hostess is strewn with heartaches and pitfalls. "Any dinner of more than 16 people," wrote the Duchess, "I consider enormous. More than eight persons means no souffle--always a melancholy omission . . . Anybody who entertains a lot runs the risk of falling into a rut... The hostess who relies upon memory alone may find herself repeating to friends precisely the same dinner, down to the entremets, that she provided six months before. It is a great pity that Mr. Thomas Watson's efficient International Business Machines Corp. . . . has not already addressed itself to this challenging problem."

Prince Akihito, heir to the Japanese throne, who will be 16 in December, had to get along with a secondhand sack suit as his first grownup outfit. Emperor Hirohito agreed that his son should have a man's suit, but it seemed uneconomical to buy a new one. So the Emperor ordered his old dark brown, big-checked tweed taken out of mothballs and altered to fit the young prince.

The Beautiful People

In London, twice-divorced Errol Flynn, 40, sporting a beard grown for a movie-in-progress based on Rudyard Kipling's Kim, announced his engagement to Princess Irene Ghica, 19, a blue-eyed Rumanian beauty, who had just arrived from Paris with a gift of his favorite food: French snails.

A dictum from Paris by Dressmaker Christian ("New Look") Dior that next spring's newest New Look will ignore bare bosoms and the plunging neckline led the Washington Daily News to headline: Jane Russell Is Declared Obsolete,

In Hollywood, Frank Sinatra insisted that "it's murder for any celebrity to visit New York" because "a lot of people are gunning for you." Then he set off on a vacation--to New York.

Three Hollywood couples who had announced their separations suddenly decided to try it again: Victor ("Beautiful Hunk of Man") Mature and wife Dorothy; Carmen Miranda and Producer-husband Dave Sebastian; World War II Hero Audie Murphy and Starlet-wife Wanda Hendrix.

The Personal Approach

Never a man to hold a grudge, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas arrived in Tucson, Ariz, for a rest, displaying a hand-painted necktie picturing his favorite mount, Kendall. Kendall is the horse that fell on the justice last month, leaving him with 17 broken ribs and a punctured right lung.

With a soldier's knack for getting right to the bottom of things, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery thought he knew how to find out if his World War II commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, will run for the U.S. presidency in 1952. Arriving in Manhattan for conferences, Monty said: "I shall ask Ike if he is going to run when I see him next week."

In Moscow, speaking before a convention of the International Democratic Women's Federation, U.S. Delegate Mrs. Muriel Draper assured her hearers that U.S. bosses are firing workers who are married women. Said she solemnly: in the U.S. "it is a crime to work if you love."

Senator Kenneth McKellar, 80, painfully burned by hot water when he took a tumble in the bathtub, refused to be photographed wearing pajamas in a Memphis hospital. He got out of bed, dressed, went back to bed fully clothed and then told the cameramen to shoot away.

Tony Lavelli, Yale's All-America 1948, 49 basketball star who turned down several pro offers in order to get on with his career as musician and composer, finally signed up with the Boston Celtics at $15,000 a season when they wrote an unusual clause into his contract: between halves he will be allowed to play his accordion for the customers.

Texas' Senator Tom Connolly got off a history-making announcement in a speech before 400 businessmen celebrating the opening of a $7,000,000 Nabisco plant in Houston. Assuring the baking company officials that they had invested their money safely, the senator predicted: "There is not going to be any Communism in this country or in Texas."

The Laurels

Vermont Farmer-Poet Robert Frost, 74, took a trip down to Manhattan to receive the Limited Editions Club's fifth gold medal for his Complete Poems, judged the book published in the last five years "most likely to attain the stature of a classic." Speaking to 300 breakfast guests, he became flustered for a moment and couldn't remember the opening lines of his famous poem about ants in a hive burying a fellow ant, which concludes:

It couldn't be called ungentle.

But how thoroughly departmental.

Veteran Movie Director Cecil B. DeMille, hailed as the film "pioneer of the year" at the tenth anniversary dinner in Manhattan of the Motion Picture Pioneers, told a tall tale of some painstaking work on his forthcoming Samson and Delilah. For ten years, he said, he followed molting peacocks around his 10,000-acre California ranch, collecting the 1,900 feathers which embellish one of the costumes worn in the film by Delilah (Hedy Lamorr).

Rita Hayworth, 31, wife of Prince Aly Khan, mother of one (by second husband Orson Welles) and expectant mother of another, was doubly honored as she marked time in Lausanne, Switzerland. The International Artists Committee in the U.S. named her one of the world's ten best-dressed mothers. In Paris, Perfumer Alfred Weil selected her as one of the world's ten most alluringly scented women.

Britain's suave old Actor A. (Alfred) E. (Edward) Matthews, on the eve of receiving an award from Theatre Arts magazine in honor of his 80th birthday, announced-that he would keep right on at his customary schedule indefinitely: eight solid performances a week on Broadway in the comedy, Yes, M'Lord, a brisk horseback ride in Central Park every morning, a convivial lunch with friends every afternoon, a seven-cent bus ride from his hotel to the theater every evening, half a bottle of good English gin every night. Actress Lynn Fontanne, scheduled to present him the award, figured in his birthday memories. Once, back in 1922, when he was a mere 53, he proposed to her in a New York taxi. But she turned him down, as he recalled it, by explaining: "You see, next Thursday I'm marrying a boy named Alfred Lunt."

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