A Matter of Opinion

Novelist Fannie Hurst earnestly reminded the world that in these days "when impacts have become so dulled to horror, we must keep people alerted to the needs of animals."

When a visitor to ex-Vice President John Nance Garner, 79, said he thought that things would be better if Garner were President, Garner cackled: "I think so, too."

Barbara Jo Walker (Miss America of 1947), who is engaged to a medical student, turned down a Hollywood contract, explained: "Love is more important."

Dowager Soprano Geraldine Farrar, 65, now a country gentlewoman in Ridgefield, Conn., had a lungful left for modern music: "They do so much to get so little."

"Being tied up with Russia," declared Britain's bellicose Lord Vansittart (Black Record), "is like being married to an 18-stone* woman who is always deceiving one and then abusing one."

The New Republic's Drama Critic Irwin Shaw performed an auto-autopsy on his play, The Survivors, which folded after eight performances on Broadway. Following his own advice to drama critics (TIME, March 25, 1946), Critic Shaw was all sympathy: "Somewhere in the middle of rehearsals [the authors/-] discovered they wished to rewrite the script almost entirely." But "the theater today has . . . the quality of a conveyor belt [which] moves in an inexorable rhythm toward the set moment at which the finished product must be taken off the line and sold. This may be all very well for an automobile. . . ."

A Question of Money

Chico, the piano-playing Marx Brother, sued Warner Bros, for $200,000. His complaint: his name had been bandied about in the dialogue of Rhapsody in Blue without his permission. Furthermore, said he, he was quoted in the picture as endorsing certain pianistic techniques to which he would actually never subscribe.

Max Baer, short-time heavyweight champion (1934-35), was sued by a motorist who had annoyed him. The motorist, who had honked his horn at Baer, charged that Baer had shown his annoyance by poking him in the face. Damages demanded: $50,000 (for the motorist), another $50,000 (for his wife, who was "frightened"), and $20,000 (for his daughter, who was also frightened).

Allen Jenkins, amiable cinema plug-ugly, was charged by Los Angeles police with drunken driving. His calico cat, Smiley, was with him in the car. "Smiley was driving," declared Jenkins. "I was just along for the ride."

Flesh & Blood

Eugene O'Neill, 59, skidded on a high-polished floor in his Manhattan apartment, broke his left arm.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower faced grandfatherhood. Captain John S. D. Eisenhower's wife, Barbara, was expecting a baby in April. It would be an eventful season. The father-to-be, preparing to teach English at West Point next summer, registered at Columbia last week for refresher courses (he would be gone just before the general arrived as president).

Babe Ruth, 53, after a checkup at a Manhattan hospital, packed his bags for Miami Beach, where he hoped to burn out a lingering cold.

Mickey Rooney, 27, flouted the show-must-go-on tradition in London, prematurely flew home after a painful smallpox vaccination.

Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, 62, was in "excellent" condition in San Diego after an operation on his foot to straighten out a bothersome deformity.

Judith Anderson. 49, blood-&-thunder wonder of Broadway's murderous Medea, bowed out for five days, returned to her bloodletting refreshed after a rest-&-transfusion for her trouble: anemia.

Congressman J. Parnell Thomas, 53, chief inquisitor of the Un-American Activities Committee, was "somewhat improved" after a week in a hospital for gastrointestinal hemorrhages.

Nods & Becks

General Jonathan M. Wainwright was elected Grand Paramount Carabao-- national commander of the Military Order of the Carabao (founded in 1900 by U.S. officers who served in the Philippine Insurrection).

Harry S. Truman got a Mississippi River towboat named after him.

Miss United Nations, the judges decided after a careful study of 40-odd entries, was Nora, well-composed, beautifully realized daughter of Brazilian Ambassador Carlos Martins. At the U.N. Club ball in Washington she got her winner's cup from Attorney General Tom C. Clark, her crown from Presidential Assistant John R. Steelman (see cut).

Henry L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan also got a boost. In a full-page photograph every bit as haunting (see cut) as a tony brassiere ad, Vogue magazine popped the enfants terribles of the '20s out at its stylish readers as two Americans worthy of being called national "influences." Other Vogue choices: Scientist Dr. Thomas M. Rivers, Philosopher John Dewey, Circuit Court Judge Learned Hand, Photographer Edward Steichen, Art Curator Alfred H. Barr Jr., Columnist Walter Lippmann, Jazzman Duke Ellington.

Ernest Hemingway and the Parker pen paid each other a pretty compliment. Hemingway, the writer who has never endorsed a cigaret simply because he doesn't smoke, lent his name (and face, and prose) to a Parker magazine advertisement; and the pen people admiringly described him in their ad as "one of today's truly great literary figures."

Eddie Rickenbaclcer was awarded an honorary Dr. Eng. (Doctor of Engineering) by Pennsylvania's Lehigh University.

The Arts

John D. Rockefeller Jr. got the cold shoulder. To the Frick Collection he offered six paintings--a Botticelli, a Piero della Francesca, a Goya, a Fragonard, a Chardin and a Nattier--and two marble busts. Seven of the Frick trustees were game, but daughter Helen Clay Frick balked, sniffed (through her lawyers): "If others wish to give works of art . . . they can use the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They should not be permitted to water the milk of the Frick Collection." The other trustees went to court to fight the thing out.

Letterateurs prepared to sit down to a new treat: the personal letters of the late Novelist Sherwood Anderson. His widow, Eleanor, presented some 10,000 of them (along with his notebooks and memoranda) to Chicago's Newberry Library. Among them: letters to Faulkner, Hemingway, Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, letters of advice to hopeful authors--and letters addressed to no one at all. Also among them, but sealed for the time being: four boxes of love letters to the fourth and final Mrs. Anderson.

The one-story frame house in Macon, Ga. where Poet Sidney Lanier was born was sold (price undisclosed) to a Macon laundryman. Civic groups wanted the city to buy it as a shrine at the going price of $25,000, but city fathers decided that the price was not right.

*252 lbs. /- Peter Viertel collaborated.

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