Old Sweet Song

Bearded Author Elliot (The Last Time I Saw Paris) Paul brooded, in the current Atlantic, on Paris' modern grisette: "The female denizen of the [Latin] Quarter, vintage 1950, is slender, supple and strong. The calves of her legs . . . indicate . . . that for years she has gone from place to place on bicycles . . . She is not consumptive, like Mimi . . . She does as she likes . . . When she takes a fancy to a poor young man . . . it is not the modern Mimi who will be timid or afraid. It will be Rudolph, if anyone, who trembles . . ."

"I am not against love and kisses," Colorado's Senator Edwin C. Johnson assured movie bigwigs. "The only thing I am concerned about is the exploitation of immorality to get people to attend picture shows."

Cinemactor Errol Flynn, 40, flew into New Orleans from Jamaica bringing his fiancee, Rumanian Princess Irene Ghica, 19, to the U.S. (see cut). The same night they flew farther along to Hollywood, announced that they would be married in Paris come September.

In Santa Monica, Calif., Curtis ("Buzzie") Roosevelt Dall, grandson of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt and remembered as a White House favorite when he was a child, was a big boy now (20); he applied for a license to marry Miss Robin V. Edwards, 21, of California (see cut).

Back in the U.S. after a triumphant, highly publicized international tour, Tennis Star Gertrude ("Gorgeous Gussie") Moran was welcomed editorially by the New York Herald Tribune, which complained that "her interviews are laden with abstruse nonsense of a 'changed woman.' No more lace panties, no more T-shirts, no more plunging necklines. We don't believe a word of it." Meanwhile Gussie's latest in a long series of fiances, Theater Executive Pat di Cicco (see cut), who met her at the airport in New York, flew back to Hollywood alone to attend to some emergency business problems.

Low Bows

Honored by the National Association of Master Plumbers (meeting in San Francisco) for being the alltime heroes of U.S. plumbers: Movie Director Cecil B. DeMille (for "selling the plumbing idea throughout the world by his favorite device of divesting some gorgeous creature--female--and filming her in a gold-plated or sunken or even fur-lined bathtub"), and Benjamin Franklin (for bringing back a copper, shoe-shaped bathtub from France).

Honored at a testimonial dinner and reception in Baltimore by his colleagues at the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations of Johns Hopkins University: Professor Owen Lattimore, as evidence of their faith and confidence in his "integrity as a scholar and loyalty as a citizen."

Honored by the Williamsburg Settlement of Brooklyn with a gold medal for "her great efforts to transpose the ideals of social justice into realities": Eleanor Roosevelt. Principal speaker at a gathering of 1,200 people to pay her honor: Playwright Clare Boothe Luce, former Republican Representative from Connecticut, who called Mrs. Roosevelt "the best-loved woman in the world today." Said Mrs. Luce: "Mrs. Roosevelt has done more good deeds on a bigger scale for a longer time than any woman who ever appeared on the public scene. No woman has ever so comforted the distressed--or so distressed the comfortable . . . Certainly not the bitterest foe of her political party or of her personal ideologies can deny that since Abraham Lincoln no one has done more to lift the hearts and raise the heads of the Negro people."

Appointed by King George VI in London as commanding officer of the anti-aircraft frigate Magpie: son-in-law Prince Philip (see cut), who will have 192 men under his command (his first). More good news for Philip: he is due to be promoted from lieutenant to lieutenant commander, which will mean an increase of nine shillings ($1.26) a day, bringing his base pay up to -L-1 12s ($4.48). His marriage allowance (as the husband of Princess Elizabeth) of 18 shillings sixpence a day ($2.23) will stay the same.

For the first time in 13 years, tiny, greying Choreographer Ninette de Valois, 51, danced before an audience (as the parlormaid in A Wedding Bouquet), to celebrate the 21st birthday of the Sadler's Wells Ballet which she founded. She took more than a dozen curtain calls at the end. Later, she was presented with a silver tray by Princess Margaret.

Inside Sources

With a stiff upper lip, a British spokesman denied that a bid of $1,250,000 had been received for Queen Mary's famed needlepoint carpet which is now on a tour of the U.S. The rumor had cropped up before, and "was discouraging many people who might have wished to put forward bids of their own."

In Hollywood, World Traveler James A. ("And so we say farewell to . . .") Fitzpatrick bid farewell to the more than 300 movie travelogues he has been making for more than 20 years. Said he: "I've run out of places to give travel talks about. From now on my films will be about faces instead of places."

In Southern Germany, U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy was among 5,000 visitors who watched the first performance in 16 years of Oberammergau's Passion Play. In some ways it was like old times in the little Bavarian village. Most notable modern touch: the white-helmeted U.S. MPs roaring through the narrow streets on motorcycles.

Ohio's Democratic Representative Stephen M. Young showed up in Washington with his fourth annual black eye and his fourth reasonable explanation: "You won't believe it, but I walked right into a plate glass door at my hotel." Previous reasonable explanations: "I got shiner number one when a dentist swung his X-ray device and bumped me. Numbers two and three were the results of accidents while playing paddle tennis in the House gymnasium."

In Paris, surrealist Artist Salvador Dali complained that the U.S., which he had just visited, was no place for an artist: "The light . . . is no good. The food . . . is barbaric. They just pour on the salt and pour on the tomato catsup."

Editors of The Next Voter, a student publication at Brooks School, North Andover, Mass., asked several hundred famous people: "What . . . is the most useful and valuable advice that you would like to give to any boy on his graduation from school?" Sample advice:

From George Bernard Shaw, 93: "None unless he asks for it, in which case warn him that you are not infallible, and are a generation out of date." From U.N. Secretary General Trygve Lie: "Understand and support the United Nations in its work of preventing a third world war." From British Author Evelyn (Vile Bodies) Waugh: "Men: go to the university; read philosophy, history and the classics; ride horses. Women: go to Europe; learn the French and English languages; study architecture and modesty." From Author-Professor Henry Steele Commager (America in Perspective): "Keep an open mind and an experimental attitude . . . Don't be perfectionist. Avoid the doctrinaire and the purely theoretical . . . Damn the absolute."

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