To Remember You By

"When one is very old, as I am," George Bernard Shaw wrote in 1946, "one of the unpleasant things seems to be that your legs give in before your head does, and you are always stumbling about. I tumble down about three times a week quite regularly . . ." Fortnight ago, while walking in the garden of his home at Ayot St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire, the 94-year-old playwright fell and broke his left thigh bone. Carted off to Luton and Dunstable Hospital, he soon got into an argument about his 74-year-old once-red beard, which the anesthetists wanted snipped. Shaw won by having the offending whiskers plastered to his face. Next day, in his cream-and-green private room, with his fractured femur fastened together by steel pins, Vegetarian Shaw sat up to munch on nuts and fruit, listened with gusto over a portable radio to BBC reports on his progress. When a nurse finished washing him, Shaw grumbled that he wanted a bath certificate: "Otherwise someone will come along tomorrow and want to do the same thing again. Too much washing is not good for antiques."

On the third day the amazing old man stood up on his good leg for a few seconds and lightheartedly wiggled the injured one. Next day he presented his doctor with a dilemma: "It will do you no good if I get over this," said Shaw. "A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care." When their patient began to suffer from the recurrence of an old kidney ailment, the worried doctors issued a few "toned down" bulletins on his condition. This week he seemed as perky as ever, offered another bit of advice to his doctors. Said the author of Back to Methuselah: "For the first hundred years one should be a student, for the second hundred one should practice, and for the third hundred one should be a consultant."*

To be presented by Dwight D. Eisenhower to Broadway's Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II (South Pacific) for "the contributions they have made to the prestige and pre-eminence of the New York theatre": the Gold Medal of the Hundred Year Association.

Together with Ascot, his family home in Leighton Buzzard, Banker Anthony de Rothschild, third son of Leopold, turned over his "priceless" art collection (paintings by Hogarth, Rubens and Gainsborough, Ming and Sung dynasty Chinese porcelain, etc.) to the British National Trust.

Recipient of an "Outstanding Citizen Award for 1950" from New York disabled veterans: U.S. Delegate to the U.N. Warren R. Austin.

All in the Family

Adroitly sidestepping 22-month-old Prince Charles, who expressed a desire to break open the camera and pull out the "birdie," Britain's Royal Photographer Cecil Beaton snapped the shutter 100-odd times, presented the world with the first pictures of Princess Elizabeth's second-born, Princess Anne. Like any other one-month-old, the young princess went through most of the ordeal either crying or looking bored, but Photographer Beaton reported that she did smile once, displaying a perfect set of pink gums.

While his mother, onetime film beauty Dolores Costello, 44, looked on aghast, John Barrymore Jr., 18, a chip off the old profile, proudly told reporters in San Francisco that "I played hookey so much I was in and out of 37 [schools] in one year."

Just 13 months after Archduke Franz Joseph of Austria, grandnephew of his imperial namesake and onetime laborer in Barcelona, filed a $1,000,000 suit charging that the Habsburg family heirlooms were being sold without cutting him in on the proceeds, a writ was served on Defendant Princess lleana of Rumania, daughter of the late Queen Marie, sister of ex-King Carol, aunt of ex-King Michael and wife of Franz Joseph's older brother, Archduke Anton.

A Thought for the Day

In accepting a B'nai B'rith award in Manhattan for "furthering the American democratic ideal," Hollywood Director Joseph (No Way Out) Mankiewicz said he was worried about "a New Minority ... in these United States [which] is being slandered, libeled, persecuted and threatened with extinction ... It is known as the American Liberal."

"I love shopping for something simple at Dior's," confessed the perennially best-dressed Duchess of Windsor. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. But, you know, I'm not particularly interested in clothes. I'm far more interested in housekeeping."

"I am not angry with nobody or his cockeyed, lousy, lying brother," Ernest (Across the River and into the Trees) Hemingway assured Manhattan Columnist Earl Wilson. "Sometimes I would like to throw at a character, from close and short. But what happens afterwards? The jaw is broke (you can hear it go like a bag of marbles), then the law suit." In a somewhat soberer mood, The Champ also explained his credo to the New York Times's Harvey Breit: "In writing I have moved through arithmetic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am in calculus. If they don't understand that, to hell with them. I won't be sad and I will not read what they say. They say? What do they say? Let them say. Who the hell wants fame over a weekend? All I want is to write well."

Hands Across the Sea

Back from England, Cinemactress Irene Dunne described Queen Elizabeth, who had personally given her a few tips on how to play Queen Victoria in The Mudlark, as "the picture of serenity . . . She is dressed every inch the Queen . . . Everything she wears matches and her shoes look as though they had never been walked in before . . ."

Back in Vienna to check up on the "combat readiness" of U.S. troops there, General Mark W. Clark, onetime U.S. commander in Austria, was greeted by a carefully rehearsed Communist booing section, which stood beneath his window at the Bristol hotel and chanted, "Clark, go home." Mused the general: "Well, at least they remember me."

While his twin-engine speedboat, Delphine X, was speeding along at 60 m.p.h. in the around-Manhattan Harwood's Trophy race, Bandleader-Yachtsman Guy ("The Sweetest Music This Side of Heaven") Lombardo had to give up the wheel when his goggles became spattered with motor oil. Delphine came in fourth.

After bowing through innumerable curtain calls, Sadler's Wells Prima Ballerina Margot Fonteyn hurried backstage at the Metropolitan Opera House to accept the greetings of British delegate to the U.N. Sir Gladwyn Jebb. Convinced that her countryman's superlative performance at Lake Success deserved something special too, the dancer personally fitted a dark red rose into Sir Gladwyn's lapel.

For London's weekly Picture goer, British Actor Rex ("Henry VIII") Harrison told his countrymen what life is like in Hollywood: "The whole thing is too big, too impersonal . . . Domestic servants are fantastically expensive and are a lordly race, indeed. I was amused and amazed . . . when couples we employed arrived in magnificent Cadillacs . . ."

* While Shaw lay abed, word got around that he had vetoed a plan by New York promoters who wanted to make a ten to 15-minute film of him giving his farewell message to mankind. Shaw told them: "Quite impossible now. The Bernard Shaw you contemplate is dead, and cannot be resuscitated by an ancient specter exactly like every other old dotard with a white beard, piping and croaking into a microphone."

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