There was something in the air. At the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo, the fabulously wealthy Aga Khan was moved to dance in public for the first time in 17 years, happily jounced his globular person (250 Ibs.) through a rumba with Ballerina Yvonna Chauvire (no Ibs.). In Chicago, retired Soapmaker Walter R. Kirk (Jap Rose, Kirk's Flakes) was sued for a separation by Wife Louisa, who said he was 72, charged him with adultery in 22 instances. (Not so, said Kirk--besides, he was 74.)

In Washington, the Treasury had good news for Vincent Astor and Evalyn ("Hope Diamond") Walsh McLean. Astor had overpaid his '44 income tax by $29,788, Hostess McLean her '45 tax by $33,370.

Past Masters

Noteworthy noisemakers in the fine arts were a couple of oldsters: in London, Sculptor Jacob Epstein, 66; in Paris, Pianist Alfred Cortot, 69.

Perennially brickbatted Sculptor Epstein got another lump on the head--this time from the famed Tate Gallery (which owns six of his sculptures). The gallery trustees--all except Sculptor Henry Moore --voted to refuse a sculpture which had been offered as a gift: Epstein's Lucifer, which he considers one of his major works. "The trustees," Sculptor Epstein thereupon told the world, "are a lot of nincompoops--except Moore." He explained further: "There have always been some people who do nothing and are against those who can."

Pianist Cortot, who had served Vichy as secretary for music and was forbidden to play for two years after the liberation, raised a noise by making his postwar debut. Cortot played the piano and the audience made the noise. The orchestra refused to accompany him, walked off stage. "Collaborationist!" yelled some of the audience. "Vive Cortot!" shouted others. Competing choruses of praise and damnation drowned out the music. Cortot grimly stuck to his keyboard, kept playing through the hubbub, finally won silence. At concert's end: an ovation.

Relatives

"Perhaps at my age, in any case," wrote Columnist Eleanor Roosevelt, 62, "it is wise to curtail one's activities." What moved her to the reflection: five months after she had dozed her way into a smashup (TIME, Aug. 26), New York State got around to taking away her driver's license.

Columnist Randolph Churchill, however, still had his. In Chesterfield County, Va., Winston's rambunctious son (who lost a wheel doing 50 in Indiana last November) was fined $50 and costs for doing 75-to-80. With the fine he had paid for doing 80 in Connecticut, that made $105 that Visitor Randolph had contributed to U.S. communities so far.

Crown Prince Saud Ibn Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, eagle-faced eldest of Ibn Saud's 40-odd sons, got an eagle's-eye view of Manhattan. In the city on a coast-to-coast tour, the Prince played the tourist to the hilt--hustled straight from the Pennsylvania Railroad Station to the Empire State Building for an educational gape. Manhattan gaped, too: with the Prince was a retinue of protectors hung with cartridge belts, golden swords, and jeweled daggers.

Movers & Shakers

"The best idea I ever heard," declared freewheeling, limber-tongued Irish Novelist Liam O'Flaherty in Paris, "was to wipe out all the women in the world. Then man could stop working entirely. There is plenty of food & drink left for all of us until we die. . . ."

"Mr. O'Flaherty probably heard me say that," commented Humorist James (Is Sex Necessary?) Thurber in Manhattan. "I once met him at a party." The idea was no good anyway at this stage, reported Thurber, for "women are getting better. . . . Mr. O'Flaherty is too late--they're too big for us now."

"The ladies," declared Verse Promoter Louis Untermeyer in Vogue, "are just not funny." (He meant lady writers.) He explained why: woman "has faced the universe and made her home in it. ... Men, sheltered by their women, have used the universe as their playground. They may work in it, but they never quite grow up in it." Women are not very funny as actresses, either, said he. His clincher: "There are ... no Marx Sisters."

Novelist James T. Farrell was probably feeling as unfunny as anybody. Fire had burned out his Manhattan apartment, and the dogged Studs Lonigan serialist faced the future practically barehanded. Up in flames (besides bales of literary notes, diaries, unpublished articles, critical essays, odds & ends); more than 50 unpublished short stories, mostly unfinished; about 100 pages of an unfinished novel (abandoned); a completed novelette, part of another; several hundred pages deleted from Farrell novels before publication; the original (unpublished) ending to Studs Lonigan; 400 pages from an unpublished sequel to Gas House McGinty.

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