Cheers & Catcalls

Pausing briefly between play dates, Actress Tallulah Bankhead told the New York World-Telegram and Sun's Columnist Ward Morehouse about the trials & tribulations of touring the U.S. in Noel Coward's Private Lives: "I've now played Private Lives everywhere except under water. We've been doing remarkable business. Got $25,000 the week before Christmas playing in Alabama, but, oh God, some of my relatives nearly drove me crazy ... In playing this part through the South I found myself getting, oh, so Southern--if Noel could have caught me!"

Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried from time to time to keep a diary, but like most other people was never able to stick to it. This was one of the facts learned last week in Hyde Park, N.Y., as almost 5,000,000 of the late President's personal and political papers were made available to researchers, scholars and historians. Other fascinating items: i) at the age of eleven, F.D.R. painfully scrawled an essay on Birds of the Hudson River Valley; 2) he once began a novel about a business tycoon, but dropped it after writing only two pages; 3) there was a reference to Joseph Stalin, whom he called "UJ." (for "Uncle Joe") in a 1944 telegram to Winston Churchill.

A fat man wearing an old crinkled sweater, a battered white hat and a floppy pair of pants with the bottoms turned up (see cut) appeared at the flossy Mandelieu course in Cannes, France, played a bit of golf, went home. One good reason startled club officials did not give the old fellow the bum's rush: he was the fabulously wealthy Aga Khan.

Entrances & Exits

In 'Japan, the Kyushu Roller Canary Club air-expressed the two winners of the island's canary contest to the White House in Washington, as gifts to President and Mrs. Truman and daughter Margaret.

Two elephants were at sea aboard the Isthmian Steamship Co.'s freighter Steel Fabricator, gifts of India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to the Washington, D. C. zoo. Originally the gifts were scheduled to be flown to the U.S., but the airlines backed down when it turned out that one of the beasts weighed 1,030 Ibs., the other 940.

Between 200 and 600 Danish Limfjord oysters were flying one way each week aboard a transport plane between Copenhagen and Cairo. In an attempt to lose weight without sacrifice of vitality, Egypt's pudgy King Farouk had put himself on an oyster diet.

The Family Circle

Movie Gossipist Louella O. Parsons gently chided a colleague, Columnist Jimmy Fidler, for writing a nationally syndicated piece assailing the high number of Hollywood divorces: "Now, Jimmy, after all, for a man who has been married four times and divorced three, your haranguing against the broken marriages of Hollywood is pretty silly."

After a couple of weeks' silence, Cinemactress Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini (see CINEMA) were talking out loud again. In Hollywood, Actress Bergman's attorney announced that she would return to the U.S. to make "the fight of her life" for custody of her eleven-year-old daughter, Pia, by her marriage to Dr. Peter Lindstrom. Asserting that she was a "fit and proper" mother, she filed suit in Los Angeles for an accounting of all her property as well as personal custody of Pia. In Rome, where Actress Bergman was caring for her seven-week-old baby, Renato Roberto, fathered by Rossellini, there were reports that Director Rossellini wanted to accompany her to the U.S.

Sultry Italian Cinemadventuress Alida Valli, 26 (The Third Man, The Paradine Case), has finally found a role that meets with her complete satisfaction, she said in Hollywood--the job of playing mother to her two-week-old son, Lorenze Marce (see cut).

The Laurels

Honored at the first annual National Book Award dinner in Manhattan, for books which the U.S. publishing trade voted the most distinguished U.S. fiction, non-fiction and poetry of 1949: Novelist Nelson Algren, 40, of Chicago, for The Man with the Golden Arm; Biographer Dr. Ralph L Rusk, 61, of Manhattan, for The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson; Dr. William Carlos Williams, 66, pediatrician-poet of Rutherford, N.J., for two books of verse, Paterson, Book III and Selected Poems.

In Princeton, N.J., on his 71st birthday, Dr. Albert Einstein ignored the occasion, as usual, and went about his business at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Awarded to General Joseph Lawton Collins, U.S. Army Chief of Staff during World War II, for his work in wartime and his efforts in behalf of world peace: the Laetare Medal, which has been given annually for the last 68 years by the University of Notre Dame to an outstanding U.S. Roman Catholic layman.

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