Monday, Nov. 22, 1954

Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

In a cozy glimpse of a madcap prince's private life, Ali Khan's longtime (19 years) chauffeur and bodyguard, Emrys Williams, disclosed in his memoirs that life with Ali was rarely dull. Things hummed more than usual during Ali's high-octane fling at marriage with mercurial Cinemactress Rita Hayworth. Recalls Williams: "The day after she had dined ... at the home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, I realized that Rita was determined to remodel the Chateau de l'Horizon on the lines of the Windsor establishment. Prince Ali's maids, who for years had worn gay summer prints and went bare-legged except for formal occasions, were measured for crisp black-and-white uniforms. Rita made them all wear black silk stockings and high-heeled black leather shoes . . . One day when Prince Ali and I were exercising together--we used to throw to each other a pint-sized Indian boy who enjoyed every moment of it--my boss said: 'I know this is all a lot of ruddy nonsense, Daffy, but it is no use protesting.' "

That old frog-throated scofflaw, Gambler Frank Costello (ne Castiglia), still at large on $50,000 bail after appealing a five-year jail sentence for dodging 1947-49 income taxes, stood in grave danger of having his wings further clipped. Because he refused to testify about his activities in the U.S. before 1925 (when he became a U.S. citizen), a federal district attorney asked a U.S. court to denaturalize Italian-born Costello immediately.

Colorado's brainy Republican Senator Eugene Millikin sat, hands clasped limply, looking rather glum, and listened to testimony before the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee in Washington. His bald pate was partly mantled by a neatly folded handkerchief, which Millikin did not bother to explain. But two days later, he landed in a hospital with a bad head cold.

The once infamous city of Sodom,* which has been pretty much out of the news since Lot's Wife turned into a pillar of salt and the whole sinful citizenry got its comeuppance (Genesis 19), was back in the limelight. Tel Aviv's Chamber Theater Company arrived in Sodom to perform for the local miners and settlers--among them, Israel's former Premier David Ben Gurion, now a sheep farmer. On a stage set up near the Dead Sea, 1,200 ft. below sea level, the actors put on a new play, Casablan, dealing with the social and psychological integration of the country's peculiarly heterogeneous immigrants--in this case a Moroccan immigrant's efforts to find a place in a new Jewish society. Few in the audience came away with a solution to their own brand of Jim Crow. Said Casablan's Playwright Yigal Mossinson: "Life has not found the solution. The stage should not anticipate life."

After a month's tour of the U.S., Liberia's popular, Bible-quoting 18th President, William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman, 58, sailed from Manhattan for Haiti. From there he will proceed to Jamaica before heading home for West Africa. While in the U.S., he picked up nine honorary degrees, was a White House guest of President Eisenhower, highlighted his visit with a foray into Georgia, the homeland of his ancestors. In Atlanta, he was welcomed by the city's white mayor but failed to meet the man who had invited him to the state, Governor Herman Talmadge, a white supremacist, who found it expedient to be elsewhere dedicating a hospital.

The editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, a nonpartisan man who is usually preoccupied with global concerns, sent a tut-tutting letter to the New York Times, taking the Republicans to task on a local issue: "I refer to an unfulfilled pledge made by the Republican Party in 1952 [for] 'a more efficient and frequent mail delivery service.' . . . My [Manhattan] office receives only one mail delivery a day. There is no large city in any other leading nation of the world--and I speak advisedly--where sucb a lamentable condition exists."

An ancient, 16-h.p. Dodge automobile, which had known glory as General John J. Pershing's personal staff car when he shuttled between French battlefields in World War I, wound up in the hands of a French junkman named Eugene Chaveneau. With a clear eye on turning a modest profit, Junkie Chaveneau coolly announced that the relic will be scrapped unless, for historical or sentimental reasons, it attracts a buyer by month's end.

Queen Elizabeth II, whose stables house such fleet specimens of horseflesh as her stakes-collecting four-year-old Aureole, learned that she had topped Britain's racehorse owners in supplementing her monarchial income this past season. Her total winnings: $114,780, picked up in 19 races by ten of her thoroughbreds--a record turf bonanza for a member of Britain's royal family.

*The original Sodom, at the south end of the Dead Sea, was destroyed by fire and earthquake about 1900 B.C. Some authorities call attention to a mound of salt, called "Lot's Wife," still standing near the modern Sodom.

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