Movers & Shakers

The bronze bust of Harry Truman, which President Miguel Aleman of Mexico presented to the University of Kansas City in 1947, seemed to have an irresistible attraction for students. They daubed it with blue and gold paint, whitewashed it, painted it red and white. Last week, as patient janitors scrubbed off the latest coat of paint (brown and green), President Clarence R. Decker lost his patience, ordered the bust taken from the campus yard and moved to a safer spot in the law building. Said he: "It's just getting to be too much to put up with."

Back at West Point for the first visit in 14 years, former Superintendent Douglas MacArthur, in well-tailored mufti, glowed with fatherly pride as young Arthur was presented with a cadet's dress cap. After the ceremony, they watched a sadly depleted Army team lose its first game of the season to Villanova, 21-7.

Because of his brother's illness (see FOREIGN NEWS), the Duke of Windsor canceled his scheduled speech to a London booksellers' banquet celebrating British publication of his memoirs, but the Sunday Express gave its readers the text anyway. Said the Duke: "It seems in the eyes of some that in writing it I have done something very terrible. It was Job, I think, who in the depth of his misery, exclaimed that he wished his enemy had written a book . . . Gentlemen, Job was dead right . . . If you've a grudge against anybody and want to do him a bad turn, all you have to do is persuade him to write a book. And it's the first one that gets you into trouble. After a man has written two or more books people get used to it . . . While A King's Story is strictly nonfiction, I do believe that, as far as its last chapters are concerned, it is in a personal sense a romance . . . I only wish that I had thought to add the old familiar ending of all romances: 'And they lived happily ever after.' "

In Rocquencourt, France, Professor Erik Husfeldt, on behalf of the Danish Association Concerning Information about the Atlantic Pact and Democracy, presented General Dwight D. Eisenhower with a gold hedgehog, a symbol of "bristling" Western defense.

Looking fresh and relaxed after a two-month vacation in Europe, Author Thomas Mann and his wife Katja arrived at New York's Idlewild airport on their way home to Santa Monica and back to work on another book. This one, said Mann, will be the story of an artistic criminal and entitled The Confessions of Felix Krull.

Before leaving on a reporting trip to Indo-China, Writer Graham Greene accepted the invitation of Sir Alexander Korda for a cruise on the Korda yacht Elsewhere around the Greek islands, through the Dardanelles to Istanbul. Among the other glittering guests: Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier, Ballerina Margot Fonteyn.

Getting Ahead

The 1952 Social Register for Washington included some new names. Among those who made the grade for the first time: Price Boss Mike Di Salle, Defense Mobilizer Charles E. Wilson, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William Fechteler, General Walter Bedell Smith.

U.S. Tennis Champ Maureen Connolly, 17, went to work on her first full-time job: as a copy girl on the San Diego Union.

Gertrude Lawrence, currently playing the Broadway role of palace governess in The King and I, took an offstage teaching part at Columbia University: coaching an afternoon class in drama.

Like most Hollywood scripts, the Franchot Tone story (TIME, Sept. 24) finally reached a happy, if implausible, ending. Out of the hospital at last, he had an amiable chat with his lawyer, decided not to bring charges against Fellow Actor Tom Neal for beating him up, instead flew off to Cloquet, Minn., where he married Barbara Payton, the cause of it all. Filmdom's Strong Man Neal took the news with chin up. Said he: "I hope they'll be very happy. As far as my plans are concerned, marriage is the farthest thing from my mind. There are so many beautiful women and so little time."

A Thousand Times No

West & East German critics found themselves in rare agreement on Playwright T. S. Eliot's Cocktail Party, playing last week in Berlin. The Communist Berliner Zeitung's critic wrote: "A resounding emptiness . . . a saloon comedy of the cheapest kind." The anti-Communist Berliner Anzeiger: "No . . . and no again. Perhaps one could read something like this in a book, because then you can put it away if you are fed up. But when they show this in the theater, you are trapped, because it would be impolite and disturbing to others if you stomped out."

The U.S. Embassy in Paris got a firsthand exhibition of a temper tantrum from Novelist Arthur Koestler when he came in for a visa. Recently given the right of permanent residence in the U.S. (under a special law excusing him from the red tape of the McCarran act) he was asked to fill out the usual forms, pay the usual fee. Apparently feeling that he should be excused from this, too, Koestler refused, stormed out shouting about red tape, huffed off to London to get a visa there. Said one clerk, after he left: "If there aren't two fireboats out to welcome that guy when he finally reaches New York Harbor, he's going to tear a skyscraper down in sheer rage."

When word came that a passenger by the name of Clark was on an incoming plane, reporters, photographers and police rushed out to Stockholm's Bromma airport in great excitement, soon cooled off when they met David C. Clark of Glen Head, N. Y. They had expected to greet home-town girl Greta Garbo, who recently arrived incognito in Paris disguised with a new hairdo and the name "Clark."

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