Monday, Jul. 22, 1957
Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
Sweeping into the distinguished visitors' gallery of Britain's House of Lords, high-spirited Cinemactress Vivien Leigh listened impatiently to debate on the proposed demolition of London's 122-year-old St. James's Theatre (which Actress Leigh had protested two days before by marching down the Strand ringing a handbell). Fuming as Baron Blackford described the St. James's as "simply an obsolete, Victorian, inconvenient, uncomfortable playhouse with no architectural or historic value," she leaped to declaim: "My lords, I want to protest against St. James's Theatre being demolished!" While their lordships sat in stunned silence at this breach of protocol, the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod gravely put the arm on the interloper: "Now you will have to go, Lady Olivier." Said Lady Olivier ruefully after her ejection: "None of the lords moved a muscle. It was what, if I had been on stage, I would describe as a dead audience."
Modern-day rustlers broke into a suburban San Francisco cemetery, made off with the tombstone of the West's TV-famed scourge of badmen. Dodge City's Town Marshal Wyatt Earp.
In New Delhi, where he had come to chat with Italian embassy officials, chubby Charmer Roberto Rossellini was restive: "I am fed up. I feel like murdering newsmen." Told that the Indian government had granted a passport to his scriptwriter and fast friend, Sonali Das Gupta, he said he planned to stay on in India for the present. In Paris, apparently unmoved by the news, his wife Ingrid Bergman had a happy, tearful reunion with pretty, 18-year-old Jennie Ann, her daughter by Dr. Peter Lindstrom. Ingrid showed the wide-eyed girl the Lido, the Louvre and Versailles, lost her temper only once to photographers who dogged them: "Can't you leave my miserable life alone?"
Continuing the small war with the Los Angeles Police Department that he reopened some weeks ago when he sudsed his soul in Mike Wallace's TV brain laundry, onetime Desperado Mickey Cohen, now a gentleman florist, protested an $11 ticket for obstructing traffic ("Another roust on the part of the Police Intelligence Department"), appealed to a jury of his peers, lost.
Avery Brundage, the U.S.'s terrible-tempered dean of athletic amateurism, wants to go to Bulgaria next September because the International Olympic Committee is meeting there, and he is president of the committee. The State Department turned down his request for passport validation on the ground that the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with that satellite. No man to allow international politics to take precedence over the higher imperatives of sport, Brundage fired his ire to newsmen: "Just imagine the blow to U.S. Olympic prestige! Why, if the president of the International Committee is unable to attend an important meeting, the United States might as well drop out of the games." Outlook by week's end: Brundage will get his passport.
Flying into Cairo with an escort of four Soviet-built Egyptian MIGs, India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spent five hours chatting with Egypt's fire-eating President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Presumed topic A: resumption of relations between Egypt and Great Britain. Middleman Nehru's neutralist comment after the confab: Anglo-Egyptian relations are "progressively returning to normal."
Surveying his family (wife and three college-minded daughters) and his service pay ($10,825 a year, including allowances), Navy Captain Chester W. Nimitz Jr., son of World War II's Pacific Fleet commander, made a hard decision: he will resign from the Navy (with the rank but not the pay of rear admiral*), take a higher-paying job with Texas Instruments Inc., an electronics firm. His seadog father, he said, did not want him to resign, but "understands the situation." Some 88 other Navy captains understand the situation and have applied for retirement this year, including famed Sub (U.S.S. Tang) Commander and Medal of Honor Winner Richard H. O'Kane. A slim hope for those who remain: the report of General Electric President Ralph J. Cordiner (TIME, May 20), advocating raises totaling $565,000,000 in the next two years for the armed services, which has drawn sharp criticism from a budget-minded Congress.
Back from Denmark to resume his one-man show, this time in Los Angeles' Greek Theater, puckish Pianist Victor Borge happily described his newly purchased, 237-year-old castle near Copenhagen as "larger than Lauritz Melchior, although smaller than the Waldorf-Astoria." Called Frydenlund, the place has no ghosts or battlements (he says it qualifies as a castle because four Kings have lived there), but it does have a 1,600-tree apple orchard and a lot of modern orchard equipment, which he calculates will pay for itself "in exactly 216 years."
* Navy and Marine Corps officers with combat awards or commendations are jumped one grade in rank--but receive no pay hike--upon retirement.
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