Work & Play

The Artists' Group of America picked the country's ten most beautiful women. Among them: Elizabeth Taylor ("Face and grace of an angel"), Ava Gardner ("Temptingly curved bosom and hip lines"), Esther Williams ("Flawlessly formed jaws and thighs"), Ginger Rogers ("Fine bold chin"), Mrs. Alfred G. Vanderbilt ("Shapely ears"), and Mary Pickford ("Everybody's 'favorite aunt' type").

From a proud Newark, N J. representative, Pope Pius XII accepted a gold badge making him an honorary member of the Newark Police Department.

Off for a tour of France, Belgium and England sailed World Welterweight Champion Sugar Ray Robinson complete with retinue (his wife, golf pro, secretary, barber, two trainers, manager, manager's wife and secretary).

For the climax of her Manhattan TV show, Faye Emerson, 33, former wife of Elliott Roosevelt, had a treat for her audience. Clutching the hand of beaming Pianist-Disc-Jockey Lyle ("Skitch") Henderson, 31 (see cut), she faced the cameras and confided: "I would like you to meet the man I am going to marry. I thought this was a good way to announce it."

You can't see life from an armchair, declared Playwright Thornton (The Skin of Our Teeth) Wilder, at Harvard for a few lectures. "I want to be exposed to the full shock-and-countershock of life. I don't want to be spared or saved from anyone or anything."

Between concerts in Kansas City, the Metropolitan Opera's Helen Traubel gave a progress report on her mystery novel Murder at the Met, scheduled for publication next year. "I have, oh, about 40 or more pages typed already. I hunt and pick at it and the process is very laborious, because I first write it out in longhand. I make notes on incidents and angles in the plot, then work it out in writing."

After visiting her old friend and teacher Jean Sibelius in Finland, bright-eyed Antonio Brico, 48, Denver conductor, flew on to French Equatorial Africa to see another old musical friend, Organist-Physician Albert Schweitzer, who had cabled: "You've always wanted to see my hospital. Get yourself a yellow-fever shot and a sun helmet and come on."

Thick & Thin

The time for mediation with Russia has passed, said Henry A. Wallace, and the U.S. should arm "as fast as possible." Since "Russia is eager to use other people to heat up the cold war," Wallace has decided, it is high time she realized that "millions of us who at one time believed in meeting her halfway are no longer in a mood for compromise."

What bothered Mrs. D. Leigh Colvin, president of the W.C.T.U., was the sponsor who was getting the cooperation of

Columbia University. The TV show, Pulitzer Prize Playhouse, sponsored by the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Co., was, cried she, "a scheme of education for alcoholism." Not at all, retorted Columbia's Dean Carl W. Ackerman. "It is raising the standards of entertainment in American homes. Any development which contributes to the improvement of home life is wholesome, because the home is the bulwark of democracy." Furthermore, "there is ample precedent" for college-brewery relations in the fact that "Vassar College was founded and endowed by

Matthew Vassar, a Poughkeepsie brewer."

While old Yukon Rhymester Robert W. Service quietly slept, thieves slipped into "Aurora," his Monte Carlo villa, made off with more than $7,000 in cash and jewels.

Currently singing on the West Coast, the Metropolitan Opera's coloratura soprano Lily Pons thought she might like to act in the movies again, admitted she was having producer trouble, but modestly added, "I am photogenic, though."

For Cinemactor Robert Montgomery it was a week of legal tangles. After 22 years of marriage, his wife left for a Reno residence, freeing him, according to Gossipist Hedda Hopper, ". . . to marry the very rich and socially prominent Mrs. William [Elisabeth Grant] Harkness . . . the love of his life." Later, in his radio commentating stint, he faced a $1,000,000 libel suit for calling the boss of Chicago's honky-tonk 42nd Ward, William J. ("Botchie") Connors, "a political mobster ... a hoodlum masquerading as a state senator."

Sweden's late King Gustaf V left the bulk of his estate, valued at about $1,935,000 to his sons, Gustaf VI and Prince Wilhelm, to Crown Prince Carl Gustaf the summer residence of Solliden on the island of Oland, to the Royal Swedish Tennis Club his 200-odd tennis trophies.

Left to his wife by the late one-eyed British desert fighter, Field Marshal Earl Wavell: an estate worth $138,824; to his son, Archibald, all his medals, including the Military Cross, the Order of the Nile, the Legion of Merit.

The Solid Flesh

As usual, there was nothing to the Washington rumors that Vice President Alben Berkley had died. Explained his wife in Paducah, Ky.: "The poor dear is a cranky man with a cold right now, but it's nothing serious."

After an attack of lumbago, King George VI was up & around again, but Queen Mary and Princess Elizabeth canceled engagements and took to their royal beds with bad colds.

After a successful operation for a "urological complaint," his doctors advised paunchy Daniel F. Malan, 76, Nationalist Prime Minister of South Africa, to rest for six weeks.

In Wellington, New Zealand, former Prime Minister Peter Fraser, 66, was on the critical list with a double dose of pleurisy and pneumonia.

In Bonn, Germany, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, 74, lost a bout with the grippe, took to his bed.

On location in Gallup, N. Mex., sultry Cinemactress Lizabeth Scott leapt like a gazelle from a twelve-foot ledge, landed with a torn knee cartilage.

"The trips here from Washington are long and hard, and I'm not so young any more," sighed old Curmudgeon Harold Ickes, 76, as he resigned as board chairman of Chicago's Roosevelt College.

In Miami, tuba-voiced Martha Raye battled a case of virus pneumonia.

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