Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
Gallup Pollsters added up the figures in their annual popularity contest for women, proclaimed that Eleanor Roosevelt, in the opinion of the U.S. public, is the world's "most admired" living woman--a distinction she has won nine years out of the past ten.* The runners-up, in the order of their public appeal: U.S. Ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe Luce, Mamie Eisenhower, Helen Keller, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, Madame Chiang Kaishek, Britain's Princess Margaret (a newcomer to the top ten), India's Madame Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Maine's Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith, former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Oveta Culp Hobby.
About to turn 81, French Equatorial Africa's revered Nobel Prizewinning medical missionary, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, tersely answered a newsman's questionnaire that sought Schweitzer's birthday opinions. Wrote he: "Silence should fall around me. I must not always talk about myself to the world. Let me be simple and modest ... I would not be true to myself should I address myself again and again to the world."
Returning to civilization from a fortnight's safari in Tanganyika, Army General (ret.) James Van Fleet, a rugged 63, brought out proof of a mighty trophy he bagged last month. Van Fleet's kill: a hefty rhinoceros whose lethal front horn measured 29 inches.
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On the eve of a trip to India for a month's preaching, Evangelist Billy Graham, in Louisville for a laymen's conference at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, got a phone call from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Summoned to Washington, he reported, to confer with Dulles and President Eisenhower, Graham canceled a sermon ("Our Christian Heritage"), hopped a plane that evening. Next day, although he missed seeing Ike, Religious Diplomat Graham emerged from an hour's chat with Dulles in the Secretary's Georgetown home. He had got a solid briefing on India, told waiting newsmen that Foster Dulles has repeatedly demonstrated himself to be "a man of peace."
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Interviewed by the quarterly English-language Paris Review, rough, tough Chicago Novelist Nelson (The Man with the Golden Arm) Algren, 46, gratuitously slipped a needle into the unprotected backside of rough, tough Chicago Novelist James T. (Studs Lonigan) Farrell. Said Algren: "Farrell . . . isn't even a real good stenographer ... He compares himself with Theodore Dreiser, but I don't think he's in Dreiser's league. He's as bad a writer as Dreiser, but he doesn't have the compassion that makes Dreiser's bad writing important." In Manhattan, Author Farrell, 51, compassionately turned the other cheek: "Algren's attacked me on the Roman Catholic Church, on splitting infinitives, and now on Dreiser, but I have no desire to attack him."
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At a news conference, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey was needled by a reporter wanting to learn what Humphrey will do about Utah's unruly Republican Governor J. Bracken Lee, who won't pay his 1955 income tax until ordered to, because he hates to see tax dollars going out in foreign aid. Harrumphed Republican Humphrey: "I'm going to sue him!"
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With the same old self-derision about the same old family weakness, erratic Actress Diana Barrymore, 34, daughter of boozy Great Profile John Barrymore, wryly confessed to New York Post Gossipist Earl Wilson that John Barleycorn has thrown her for another fall, announced that she has voluntarily signed herself into a suburban sanitarium for six months. Asked if she had ever talked about drinking with her bibulous daddy, Diana hiccuped ("it must be that asparagus"): "Sure, but I wasn't very old then --just old enough to mix his drinks . . . At that time I drank like people . . . Now I drink like a giraffe."
One of those rare girls who can stand up and take a bow all at once, Actress Jayne Mansfield, star of the Broadway hit Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (TIME, Oct. 24), stood up and took a bow for Underwear-Negligee Associates, Inc., which, convening in Manhattan, named her "Miss Negligee of 1956."
Noted Indianapolis Philanthropist Josiah K. Lilly Jr., retired Pharmaceuticals tycoon (Eli Lilly & Co.), gave his rare books, one of the last great private collections of its kind, to Indiana University (his alma mater: the University of Michigan, class of '14). Among the rarities, valued at about $5,000,000 and catapulting the worth of Indiana's library far above that of any other Midwestern university: the first printed chronicles of the travels of Columbus, De Soto and Cortez, the Caxton edition (circa 1478) of the Canterbury Tales, four Shakespeare folios, a tidy bundle of Robert Burns's original manuscripts.
The University of Illinois picked up a good bargain for $30,000: Illinois-born Poet Carl Sandberg's private library, now housed at Sandburg's North Carolina goat farm. Items: reams of Lincolniana (including the manuscripts of three volumes of Sandburg's works on Lincoln), revised manuscripts of Sandburg's Complete Poems and his yet unpublished Song Bag, Sandburg's correspondence with a galaxy of fellow poets, as well as with such letter writers as Evangelist Billy Sunday and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
A composer who long ago wrote a ditty in which he relished the prospect of murdering the bugler arose without a whimper to go to a dawn patrol breakfast in Manhattan. There, bifocaled (67) Songwriter Irving Berlin was given a silver beaver award by the local council of the
Boy Scouts of America. Early Riser Berlin was honored for setting up a fund to boost both Boy Scout and Girl Scout groups with proceeds from his longtime hit (and sometime unofficial national anthem) God Bless America.
At week's end Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin had been absent, without explanation, from the Moscow public eye for twelve days.
A Baltimore court appraised the estate of the late Aircraft Pioneer Glenn L Martin (TIME, Dec. 12), set its value at some $16 million--the largest estate ever probated in Baltimore. Items: $14,300,000 in stocks and bonds, $500,000 in cash, 3,000 acres (mostly a game preserve) on Maryland's Eastern Shore, a Baltimore mansion, and other choice real estate.
With 7,490 entries winnowed down to 15 final gems in Japan's annual Imperial Poetry Contest, Japan's royal family and nine of the commoner finalists (each won a lacquered stationery box) celebrated at the traditional party in Tokyo's Imperial Palace. Subject of this year's poems: early spring.* To climax the lyrical wingding, in keeping with a thousand-year-old custom, the effort of Emperor Hirohito, not in the competition, was read five times. As usual, it seemed to have lost a lilting something in its English translation:
Happily, a pheasant roams in my garden Where morning frost has fallen And spring's coldness still lingers on.
* In 1951, Mrs. Roosevelt ran second to Australia's famed but controversial polio fighter Sister Elizabeth Kenny, who died in 1952. * Next year's theme: tomoshibi (light). The contest is open to poets of all nationalities and calibers. Entries (one per poet) must stick to the subject, be reasonably concise, arrive no later than Nov. 10, 1956 in the mailbox of: Annual Imperial Poetry Party Contest Committee, Imperial Household Office, Tokyo.
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