Thoughts & Afterthoughts

Prize-winning Author-Playwright Robert E. Sherwood thumbed through a new edition of Painting as a Pastime and came to some definite conclusions about its author, Winston S. Churchill. "It would seem that if Mr. Churchill . . . considers each new, vacant canvas not as an ultimate objective, but as a point of determined attack," wrote Sherwood, "he must be rated as a young painter who is definitely worth watching."

"She's a very nice dame," said Cinemactor Errol Flynn of lissome Rumanian Princess Irine Ghica, 19, the girl he says he wants to marry next. "She can't cook. She doesn't know any lawyers, but she's loaded with charm."

"I don't want to star in French postcards," protested bountifully endowed Cinemactress Marie (My Friend Irma) Wilson in a spirited defense of the low-cut evening gown. "I just want to add a little life to the American postcards."

Master Sergeant James R. Hendrix, Congressional Medal of Honor winner at 19, had a new ambition at 24: "I want to finish grammar school. I only got to the fourth grade before the war."

Gossip columnists were annoying Rex (Henry VIII) Harrison and Actress Lilli Palmer, who is currently starring in the Broadway production of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. "We never go anywhere alone any more," Harrison said. "Why, even if I go out to lunch with my mother, a story will show up that mother and I are going steady."

"I'm mad about culture," trilled Authoress Ilka (Past Imperfect) Chase, 44, who blew into Portland, Ore. to tell dealers how to sell Cadillacs to women. "Of course," she told the press, one "can be very successful or proficient and still not be cultured."

Comings & Goings

Silver-Shirted Rabble-Rouser William Dudley Pelley, 59, was getting out of the Federal Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Ind. after serving about half of a 15-year sentence for sedition. Probable next stop: the state prison in Raleigh, N.C., where he has up to five years to serve on an old sentence under the blue sky laws.

Iowa-born Nila Cram Cook, "Blue Serpent Goddess" of the early '30s and onetime ascetic disciple of the late Mahatma Gandhi who gave up Hinduism for the high life of New Delhi, later moved on to Greece, Turkey and Iran, where she founded a national opera and ballet company, turned up in Jericho. Weighing over 200 pounds, and nursing a broken left leg, she was engaged in an arduous literary task: "I'm translating the Koran into English, annotating it marginally. I shall make the Koran comprehensible to every intelligent person who can read English."

It was old home week for Cinemactress Rita Hayworth, who journeyed to Gstaad, Switzerland, with her newborn daughter, Princess Yasmin. There she and her husband, Prince Aly Khan, enjoyed a family reunion with her five-year-old daughter Rebecca (by her second husband, Cinemactor Orson Welles), and his two sons by a previous marriage (to Joan Yarde-Buller), Karim, 13, and Amyon, 11.

Admiral William ("Spike") Blandy, a top candidate for Chief of Naval Operations until Admiral Forrest Sherman was tapped for the job last fall, retired from the Navy after 40 years of service, and took on a civilian job: president of the newborn Health Information Foundation, a nonprofit medical news and research service supported by the drug and medical supply industries.

A blind couple in Copenhagen stopped to ask directions of the driver of a parked car, were immediately whisked off to their destination by Denmark's 50-year-old King Frederik IX.

Ups & Downs

"My gosh!" moaned Secretary of State Dean Acheson's tailor. "The Secretary has never selected a suit louder than a mild-toned plaid. He's very discriminating, and such a gentleman ... a perfect size 42." But the Custom Tailors' Guild found the Secretary guilty of "sometimes overdressing," replaced him on their list of ten best-dressed men with General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Other winners: Bandleader Sammy Kaye, Dance Instructor Arthur Murray, Paper Magnate Harry E. Gould, radio M.C. Ralph Edwards.

Raven-haired Mimi Benzell, the Met coloratura soprano, was voted "the most beautiful woman in opera" by a group of artists in Manhattan, and tossed aloft to record a picture of triumph from the shoulders of her beaming judges.

Ex-Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, the apoplectic former chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee now serving six to 18 months for payroll padding, was reported in charge of the prison's chicken flock at Danbury, Conn, and earnestly studying ways & means of increasing its dwindling egg production.

For the second time in a year, gangsters dynamited the $100.000 Brentwood, Calif, villa of Hollywood Mobster Mickey Cohen, 38. Mickey and his wife, LaVonne, who were asleep in another room at the time, were unhurt. But the neighbors were getting a little peevish over all the racket made by Mickey's playmates.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.