The Hard Way

The will of Hollywood's late, Red-hating Director Sam (For Whom the Bell Tolls) Wood carried on the crusade. A clause in the will requires every beneficiary, except his widow, to file a non-Communist loyalty oath before collecting.

Bestselling Novelist Willard (Knock on Any Door) Motley looked suspiciously like a mugger to Chicago police, as he prowled about the Gold Coast early one morning, absorbing local color. He talked strangely, too, after the cops picked him up. "I'm a jack-roller," he cracked, refusing to give his name, "but the pickings are pretty thin tonight." Later, at the station house, he let them in on the gag, and they let him off on $10 bond.

Twittery Cinemactress Billie Burke, svelte and pretty at 63, revealed that, among other exercises, she stands on her head every morning. "It gets the blood to the brain," said she. "That's good for any thinking that has to be done ... I suppose it's also good for my feet and the rest of me."

Playwright Thornton Wilder (Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth) revealed some facts about that new play, still unnamed and still in the works: it will need no scenery, no curtain, no stage lights, no music. The house lights will not be dimmed at any time, and the action will unroll without a break. The subject: the life of a man. The casting: different actors to play the hero at different ages; one actress to play all the major female parts.

The Payoff

On her Manchester opening of A Streetcar Named Desire, Actress Vivien Leigh got not only critical raves but a courtly gesture from Director Laurence Olivier: despite wild applause, he declined to take even a single bow on his wife's big night.

In Washington's Wardman Park Hotel, Cordell Hull had "no special festivities" (but a flock of telegrams from the world's great) on his 78th birthday, his first outside Maryland's Bethesda Naval Hospital in four years.

In his Swiss chalet at New Paltz, N.Y., Oscar (Tschirky) of the Waldorf, in semi-retirement since 1943, observed his 83rd birthday at a quiet family dinner.

Ambassador Lewis Douglas was back in London after the dollar talks, minus the patch he has worn over his left eye since it was snagged by a wind-blown salmon hook last April. He paused on the front stoop of the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square to exchange grave greetings with an old family retainer named Reggie (see cut).

New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey arrived in Chicago to become, with 152 others, a 33rd-degree Mason.

William Randolph Hearst got the Grand Cross of the Order of Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, the highest decoration the Republic of Cuba can give.

Troubled Times

A report from Trieste revealed that Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito, about to take a motor launch from Pola to Fasana on the Adriatic, waited on the dock while advance men made a security check. Sure enough, they found and heaved overboard a time bomb which had been strategically hidden under the marshal's seat.

In Springfield, Illinois' Governor Adlai Stevenson, 49, inaugurated in his first term last January, agreed to a separation (and an uncontested divorce later) from Socialite Ellen Borden Stevenson, 40, after 20 years of marriage, three children. Deploring "the incompatibility of our lives," the governor declared: "I am deeply distressed . . . We have separated with the highest mutual regard."

In Ann Arbor, Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg, 65, had a 6 1/2-hour lung operation.

Justice William O. Douglas, 50, enjoying one last ride in Washington's Cascade Mountains before going back to work at the Supreme Court, stopped to tighten a slipping saddle girth. When he tried to remount, the horse reared, threw him and rolled on him; then Douglas slid and sprawled down 50 feet of rocky slope. Injuries: 13 broken ribs and a puncture of one lung.

Inside Sources

The absence of Harold Stassen, president of the University of Pennsylvania, who has been in London, was getting to be a campus issue. "Where's Dr. Stassen?" cried the undergraduate Daily Pennsylvanian. "This question has been asked more by the incoming freshman class than the directions to College Hall . . . And we realize what a hard year the first one is. But all good things must come to an end and we believe that Dr. Stassen unnecessarily missed the opening peal of the school bell. After all, the European trip was his third vacation, he'd just returned from Maine and earlier in the summer he's had in Minnesota a fishing trip, we're told. Together the three jaunts lasted well over two months, ample, even for a freshman."

Handwriting Analyst Muriel Stafford considered the evidence and announced that Joe DiMaggio "combines a flair for the dramatic with care and accuracy regarding detail ... a writer who does things well, calmly, doesn't like to be rushed" (see SPORT).

"It is infinitely better," concluded Tokyo Raider Jimmy Doolittle, "to avoid a war than win one."

"Nobody seems to know yet how television is going to affect the radio, movies, love, housekeeping, or the church," mused Edgar Bergen, "but it has definitely revived vaudeville. I wish there would be a guardian over vaudeville this time to.prevent the same people from killing it who killed it before." He added darkly: "Several of them are back at the scene of the crime."

Cinemactress Jane Russell "is profoundly, indeed, apocalyptically, interested in the future state of the world--her approach being religious (though not ecclesiastical) rather than political." So, in his weekly newspaper column, announced awed Laborite M.P. Tom Driberg, who had been showing Visitor Russell around Parliament. "She has studied the Bible and its interpretation deeply. In her mother's garden in California, she told me, she and a group of other young people have built a chapel; down there, among the eucalyptus trees, strictly for prayer . . . Crowds of them come in every evening."

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