The Solid Flesh

Britain's Prime Minister Clement Attlee was ordered by doctors to cut his engagements to the minimum. His ailment: "an early duodenal ulcer."

William Z. Foster, the nation's No. 1 Communist, was ordered by doctors to go to bed and rest for several weeks. Something he must not worry about: an indictment for conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. Government.

Bob Hope, rehearsing for a radio show, suddenly gagged and choked, wheezed painfully until a doctor came and took a fishbone out of his throat.

Amos Alonzo Stagg, hale & hearty at 86, took charge of the opening football practice at Susquehanna University, began his 59th year as a college football coach.

Curtis Boettiger, hale & hearty after full recovery from a mild attack of polio two weeks ago, applied for a passport to accompany his Grandmother Roosevelt to the U.N. meeting in Paris, where he would be her secretary.

Grandma Moses (TIME, Sept. 6), chipper as ever on her 88th birthday, cut a cake decorated with scenes inspired by Grandma Moses' paintings. With a helping hand from Admirer Norman Rockwell, who also paints, after his fashion, she struck a pose that even her most critical dealer would accept as an authentic American primitive (see cut).

Slings & Arrows

Garry ("The Man Without a Country") Davis, 26, once a gay blade about Broadway, was pretty serious in Paris about his one-man crusade for World Government (he renounced his U.S. citizenship last May to dramatize his point).

When the French government gave him 24 hours to get out of the country, Garry took sanctuary on the steps of the U.N. administration building. There, sunning himself on territory that is technically international property, he relaxed and prepared to wait until U.N. acts on his case. His equipment for the vigil: a knapsack, a bedroll, a portfolio, a portable typewriter, a copy of The Fountainhead, the United Nations World, and TIME. Said Crusader Davis: "If the U.N. can't establish the status of one person, it's plain to see that they cannot do it for all men."

Protested: the will of Eleanor Medill ("Cissie") Patterson, late publisher of the Washington Times-Herald; by her only daughter, Countess Felicia Gizyclca (exwife of ex-Patterson Columnist Drew Pearson). Felicia, who ran away from home at 18, had been left most of Cissie's personal effects, some real estate, and an income of $25,000 a year for life. But the estate totaled better than $16 million (the Times-Herald was left to seven executives). Felicia protested to the court that her mother was not of "sound mind and memory" when she made the will, and that it had been "procured from Mrs. Patterson by fraud and deceit exercised upon her by some person or persons unknown."

In Fordingbridge, England, Artist Augustus John (TIME, May 31), 70, who used to raggle-taggle among the gypsies when he was younger, ran smack into a silly technicality of civilization: a -L-2 fine for driving a car without a license.

Cinemactor Robert Mitchum was indicted by a Los Angeles grand jury on two counts (possession of marijuana and conspiracy to violate the narcotic laws). Meanwhile, his studio (RKO) hastened to make hay. Pleasantly amazed at the rash of public sympathy and sentimentality over Mitchum's trouble, the studio planned an immediate release of Bob's latest movie (Rachel and the Stranger, co-starring Loretta Young, and presenting Mitchum as a frontier home-wrecker).

Thoughts & Afterthoughts

On a visit to friends in San Francisco, Bernard Baruch found a park bench to sit on, newsmen to talk to, and a thought for the week: "The people of the United States had better do some tall thinking. Too many people are talking."

Greta Garbo, the secretive Swede who has been in & out of Hollywood for 22 years, finally came to a decision. She pulled on some slacks and an old jacket, and dropped into the Los Angeles Federal Building to file her first papers, for U.S. citizenship.

Beauteous Kay Summersby, the onetime Mayfair dress model and WAC captain who drove Ike Eisenhower's staff car, had finished a book called Eisenhower Was My Boss. An excerpt from Kay's preface was used in a long blurb for the syndicated newspaper rights: "It is, in a way, a report to women, other women ... I was to work and eat and ride and laugh and drink and play and suffer with the famous commander ... I was to know love, intimately. And I was to know, just as intimately, the unspeakable pain of losing my lover in battle . . ."t Her job was, she knew, an enviable one --"An obvious side door to the Supreme Commander's mental apartment." But it had its unpleasant features: "There were some ridiculous (though hurtful) smears on my reputation." To clear up the record, Kay announced, she was "peeling off my traditional British reserve and stripping down to naked truth."

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