Happy Days

Queen Juliana of The Netherlands turned 40. She stayed home in Soestdyk Palace with husband Bernhard and their four daughters, while military parades and civil celebrations were staged in every town, and church bells set up a clamor all across her little country.

William Randolph Hearst turned 86. He stayed quietly in his home in Beverly Hills, while all five of his sons gathered round for the occasion.

King George and Queen Elizabeth, on the evening of their 26th wedding anniversary, dined quietly and alone in the Chinese Room of Buckingham Palace. But later they announced an evening party at the Palace for this week, the first since the King's ailing leg acted up last fall.

Samuel Goldwyn, after a successful prostate operation, checked out of Manhattan's Harkness Pavilion, where he had quietly observed his 24th wedding anniversary, with wife Frances and a bottle of Madeira, smuggled past the doctors.

Hard Lines

Claire Chennault, wartime skipper of the Flying Tigers, back home with his Chinese bride and three-month-old daughter for a rest and a couple of congressional hearings on China, took a fighter's view of the whole situation: "I have seen it a lot worse for us in China and the Pacific than even it is now, and I have seen us turn it around and win . . . There are millions and millions of Chinese who don't like Communism and will fight it."

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who got bad notices in Britain with publication of his Crusade in Europe* last November, got even worse ones in the U.S.S.R. "Characteristic aversion for facts," shrilled Moscow's New Times. What's more, the general was just a "parade commander in chief ... a tool" of Winston Churchill, and a "true Wall Street lackey" who "falsifies history."

Norman Mailer, whose The Naked and the Dead is still a bestselling U.S. novel, was too outspoken for the British. "Incredibly foul and beastly . . . No decent man could leave it lying about the house, or know without shame that his womenfolk were reading it," fumed the Sunday Times in a front-page editorial.

The Restless Foot

Arturo Toscanini, 82, slipped getting into his bathtub, landed hard, put off his trip to Italy for three weeks.

Rabbi Isaac Halevi Herzog, who talks with a bit of a brogue picked up during 21 years in Ireland (eleven of them as Chief Rabbi), flew to the U.S. as Chief Rabbi of Israel, to help with the $250 million fund-raising campaign of the United Jewish Appeal.

Princess Margaret, constantly ogled by crowds, reporters and detectives on her trip to Italy, was nonetheless boosting Anglo-Italian relations. "Her eyes," burbled a stricken newsman, "look ahead. They are the most beautiful things she has brought to Naples, grey and very tender, clear as the air of Capri."

The Solid Flesh

Lewis Douglas, 54, Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, was coming along fine: doctors now thought that they could save his left eye, which was snagged by a wind-blown fishhook a month ago on the Test River. Leading off a long report to the State Department, Douglas cracked: "As I see the problem from my bed, and through one eye . . ."

Sharman Douglas, 20, the Ambassador's daughter, displayed the same sort of fortitude. Refusing to be slowed down by a little thing like a sore shoulder, she kept her date, wearing her arm in a sling, with the highly eligible Marquess of Blandford. With another pair of international setters, the theater's Gertrude Lawrence and Danny Kaye, they took in the show at a flossy London cafe, where an alert cameraman caught all four of them with the giggles.

Ezio Pinza, 56, longtime star basso of the Met and now Broadway's newest matinee idol (South Pacific], ran briefly afoul of a new occupational hazard. Reaching for a high note at one performance, his voice cracked. "It was the talking I do on the stage . . . that's new to me," he explained later."! can sing and have sung for several hours without being bothered . . . You'd think just talking would be easier than singing . . . Well, it isn't for me."

The Wreathed Brow

Rough-hewn John Huston, onetime actor, painter, boxer, Mexican army cavalryman, and Hollywood's 1948 Oscar-winning writer-director (Treasure of the Sierra Madre), was named winner of 1949's One World Award. Previous winners of the free round-the-world air junket, established in honor of the late Wendell Willkie: Radio Scripter Norman Corwin, who took it, Albert Einstein and the late Fiorello La Guardia, who couldn't make it. Huston planned to take a camera with him and shoot a documentary.

Novelist-Philosopher Thomas Mann, who fled Germany and the Nazis in 1933 and never went back again, was granted honorary citizenship of the city by the city council of Weimar, in the Russian zone.

Princess Elizabeth, who has played the piano since she was a child, was given an honorary Doctorate of Music at University College (Bangor, Wales), as the first official act of the college's newly inducted Honorary Chancellor, Prince Philip.

Margret Thors, pretty daughter of the Icelandic Minister to the U.S., was crowned Queen Shenandoah XXII at the annual Apple Blossom Festival by Alben Bark'ey. The Vice President of the U.S. wore an expression of statesmanlike gravity as he pondered the proper adjustment of her crown.

The Pulitzer Prize awards ($500), presented annually by the trustees of Columbia University, this year included prizes to Novelist James Gould Cozzens, for his Guard of Honor; Playwright Arthur Miller, for his Death of a Salesman; and sometime Playwright Robert Sherwood, for his Roosevelt and Hopkins, "a distinguished American biography .. . teaching patriotic and unselfish services to the people, illustrated by an eminent example."

*For further news of Crusade in Europe, see RADIO & TV.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.