Literates

It was just like old times. In Rome, one of Casanova's old pawing-grounds, police seized a new edition of his memoirs on the grounds of "obscenity and immorality." In Boston, the local censor drew up a three-page list of "obscene and profane" words that Eugene O'Neill would have to cut out of The Iceman Cometh before Bostonians could see it.

In Manhattan, bubbly Noel Coward, 47, arrived from England on his first visit in four years. Between his arrival and departure (for a spot of footloose fun in the West Indies), he stayed behind a secretary who stood off the press. Just where in the West Indies was he going? "Mr. Coward," said the secretary, "wants it vague."

In Denver, Columnist Randolph Churchill, who had attracted attention to himself by reporting a bathroom conversation with a plumber (TIME, Feb. 10), now bravely faced a platform duel with a carpenter. From New Jersey the carpenter wired a challenge to a "debate on the merits of the British Empire." Winston's son referred the matter to his lecture manager.

Author Elliott Roosevelt (As He Saw It) had himself a week. On radio's Meet the Press program, two of the men picked to pick on him were Henry J. Taylor and Fulton Lewis Jr., ardent haters of all-things-Roosevelt. Radio listeners heard the preliminary growling and snapping. Tabloid readers got in on the finish.

Lewis and Elliott, after the broadcast, were straightening each other out on the subject of Elliott's plunge in the Texas State Network a few years ago--the one Jesse Jones fished him out of. Elliott's actress-wife, Faye Emerson, presently put her oar in.

"You weren't in the picture at that time,'" Lewis told her. "In fact, you weren't too close to Elliott at that time." (Reporter Taylor reported next day that Lewis had also called her an "interloper.")

"You've insulted my wife!" cried Elliott to Lewis.

He had not, said Lewis.

Dick Harrity, an agent for Elliot's publishers, then stepped forward and planted one on Lewis' jaw.

"Who the hell are you?" cried Lewis, still standing.

Harrity knew a cue when he heard one. "I'm just a guy," said he, "who happened to be here." Said Faye (according to Reporter Taylor), as the party broke up: "You just wait and see. This will all be in the newspapers."

Past Masters

Hank Greenberg, just sold by Detroit to Pittsburgh, decided at 36 that he didn't want to play ball any more. "I am considering retirement from the active playing ranks," was the way he put it. He explained with some style: "... I do not desire to start anew in a strange environment."

In Las Vegas, Nev., precocious Ellsworth ("Sonny") Wisecarver, who won tabloid glory by running off with one mother-of-two when he was 14, another mother-of-two when he was 16 (TIME, Nov. 26, 1945), turned 18 and contemplated settling down. He was looking for a job, said he, so he could marry a friend who is 16.

In Munich, ex-German-American Bund-leader Fritz Kuhn was given a clean bill of health by denazification authorities, who pointed out that he had not lived in Germany during the Nazi regime.

In Chicago, Al Capone, who was responsible for some of the Prohibition era's most splendid funerals, was carried to his grave by gravediggers and buried in five minutes.

Statesmen's Choice

When Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that Britain should buy less U.S. tobacco, he got a ready reply. It would help, suggested Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton, if "large numbers of the population did not desire to consume tobacco." Churchill, famed cigar gobbler, promptly went up in sparks. "You always try to make a joke," he cried, "by turning a personal point against me. I have the utmost contempt for your taunts." No taunt intended, protested Dalton: "I also smoke occasionally."

When a Manhattan reporter called on Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., he discovered that the statesman had a new pet name for his songstress wife, Hazel Scott. He calls her "Teddy Bear"; she calls him "Bunny." "I used to call her 'Squirt,' " explained the Congressman. "But that was before our marriage. . . . She was so small and lonely, a mass of frustration till I came along."

The Strenuous Life

Cinemactress Joan Crawford, who has managed to break her right ankle three times, tripped over a carpet in her house, fell down a flight of stairs, went to bed with a torn ligament in her left ankle.

Tenor Lauritz Melchior, singing Siegmund in Die Walkure at the Met, drew the magic sword from the tree, leaped grandly from his table-top perch, broke his left big toe. After intermission, Siegmund carried on in a splint.

Vaudeville's everlasting Ted Lewis, laughter-&-tears minstrel for three decades, sued Chicago's Sherman Hotel for $100,000. Lewis' version: he wanted breakfast in his room; the waiter brought it on a tray instead of on a table. Lewis picked up the phone and complained. Cried the waiter: "What are you trying to do--get me fired?" and knocked the Sherman's guest flat. Lewis, who claims that one hand is still on the bum, said it isn't the $100,000 that counts: "That's for my heart."

At a shipyard near Liverpool, the comely Countess of Dudley (hostess to the Duke & Duchess of Windsor during the great jewel robbery last October) stepped forward to christen a Channel steamer just as one playful workman threw a snowball at another. The Countess got the snowball square in the face. She laughed convincingly, tossed the workmen her bouquet, christened the ship St. David.

Contents Noted

Subscribers to the Communist New Masses opened a form letter appealing for funds to keep the magazine going, discovered that it was signed by famed

British Scientist J. B. S. Haldane, lately a U.S. visitor. "The editors have promised to let me know the result of the appeal," wrote Communist Haldane, who then proceeded to give the personal note a real pounding: "They wanted to cable me. I am for economy. They are going to write instead."

Friends and relatives of the late Thomas Alva Edison, hopeful of long-hidden scientific wonders, watched his son Charles open the inventor's old rolltop desk (it had been closed to the public since Edison's death in 1931). Inside, besides masses of notes crammed into pigeonholes; a clutter of zoo-odd vials and miscellaneous containers, a piece of vulcanized rubber, scraps of tinfoil, scraps of old cigars, packets of seeds, two biographies of Edison, a collection of smoking-room stories, a bottle of soda mints, a partly used bottle of mouthwash, a plug of chewing tobacco.

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