The Personal Approach

"I'm a terrific fight fan," the Metropolitan Opera's 22-year-old Soprano Patrice Munsel told an interviewer. "I love it. I go practically every Friday night. The only thing I don't like about it is that it's so basic."

Charles Gates Dawes, Vice President under Coolidge and author of the original Dawes Plan for putting Germany back on her feet (after World War I), reached 82 in Chicago, plumped for: 1) universal military training; 2) universal cooperation in putting Germany back on her feet.

Herbert Hoover, lately turned 73, encountered the press as he passed through Chicago, cleared up something that had been on at least one reporter's mind. "No man at my age," said the only living ex-President, "should take the nomination."

Eleanor Roosevelt finally made public reply, in the Ladies' Home Journal, to Jim Farley's public charge, in Collier's, that the Parleys had got a moderately cool shoulder in White House social life. Wrote the ex-First Lady: "Unwittingly in some way I ... seem to have hurt both Mr. and Mrs. Farley. For that I am genuinely sorry . . . but I feel I never treated them any differently. . . ." Being a member of the Cabinet, observed Mrs. Roosevelt, implied that one was considered "a man of parts." She pursued sweetly: "Mr. Farley failed to understand this. His tremendous emphasis on purely society questions ... when the really important things were . . . social questions of the day shows that . . . Mr. Farley thought . . . little of those objectives. . . ."

Viscount Jowitt, Britain's Lord Chancellor--who looks every inch the part, in or out of his white wig--arrived in the U.S. for a month's visit, explained himself to Manhattan reporters. The Lord Chancellor, Jowitt said, is a "sort of combination of a chief justice and a minister of justice." One of the titles of the 1,300-odd-year-old office is Keeper of the King's Conscience. "The King's conscience," confided the Lord Chancellor, "is much easier to keep than me own." He answered a personal question that had been on many a plain citizen's mind. How was it in that long judicial wig, in the summer? The Lord Chancellor's reply for history: "Very uncomfortable." And ditto for the sack of wool which tradition makes him sit on.

Arts & Decorations

In Manhattan, a pair of new, tailor-made doors were packed off to the slim & sporty Maharaja of Indore at his air-conditioned palace. The doors (covered with jewel-like paintings in the Persian manner) were made of aluminum, stood eleven feet high, were large enough for the Maharaja to ride a horse through comfortably, if he's ever in the mood.

In Bethesda, Md., delivered to convalescing Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King at the Naval Hospital was the special gold medal authorized last year by Congress "on behalf of a grateful nation." The back of the medal bore a muscular charioteer with three plunging horses, the front side a rock-solid, very nautical admiral (see cut).

In Utrecht, The Netherlands, goldsmiths completed 18 months' work on a bejeweled, gold-sheathed sword, engraved: "Queen Wilhelmina to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in grateful memory of the glorious liberation."

In Manhattan, Herschel Vespasian Johnson, deputy U.S. delegate to the U.N., got a brown-paper parcel by express from a stranger, turned it over to the bomb squad, just in case. Xrayed, oiled, and opened, it yielded: one jar of scalp cream, one jar of shampoo, one jar of scalp massage mixture.

The Stream of History

William Shakespeare faced yet another test. The Westward-looking Japanese would soon be dropping into Tokyo's Imperial Theater to catch Romeo and Juliet.

Robert Burns looked like the coming song-&-dance favorite. Headed for Broadway this season were two shows based on his life--both of them musicomedies.

Hollywood continued to wrestle with larger subjects. Latest to be picked for immortalization by way of the biographical film: the Marx Brothers (all four at once).

Eddie Cantor, 55, whose own immortalization on celluloid will be on view soon, announced for the first time in years that he would retire.

"Peaches" Browning, 36, another historical figure, was in a rut. Manhattan's famed child bride of the '20s (at 16 she married aging Millionaire Edward "Daddy" Browning) sued her fourth husband for divorce, in Burlingame, Calif. She charged him with cruelty. Husband Ralph N. Willson charged her with cruelty, too, sued her in Reno. Pending: a divorce suit by No. 3, San Francisco Merchant Joseph S. Civelli, who declares that her divorce from him was no good.

Doris ("Richest Girl in the World") Duke seemed to be getting in a rut herself. In Paris this week the high-styled ex-wife of James H. R. Cromwell, ex-U.S. Minister to Canada, was to marry another diplomat of a sort: high-styled Porfirio Rubirosa, honorary charge d'affaires at the Dominican Consulate. Rubirosa (whose first wife was the daughter of Dominican Dictator Rafael Trujillo) has been free to marry only since last May, when his second wife, baby-faced French Cinemactress Danielle Darrieux, divorced him.

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