Matter of Opinion

In Paris, Sir Charles Mendl, 79, whose late wife, Elsie de Wolfe Mendl, ruled the international smart set with a queenly hand, announced that he had wooed and won a 35-year-old Parisian brunette, Mme. Yvonne Riley. The secret of his success? "Young men talk too much about themselves. Old men don't, or shouldn't. I let women talk about themselves, and they love it."

In San Francisco, sometime White House Favorite Jonathan Daniels moistened a finger to the 1952 convention winds: "I don't know if the President will be available," he said, but Senators Paul Douglas and Estes Kefauver "are possibilities. They are both able men. I'm not advocating any particular candidate, however."

Speaking in Tyler, Texas, U.S. Attorney General J. Howard McGrath gave a native son, Senator Lyndon Johnson, 42, a Democratic pat on the back: "Johnson is a young, aggressive statesman whose star of destiny is yet to rise. I hope to see him some day as President of the United States."

Affairs of State

While their husbands were meeting at Eighth Army headquarters in Korea, Mrs. Frank Pace Jr., wife of the Secretary of the Army, joined Mrs. Matthew B. Ridgway in pouring tea for a benefit fashion show at the Army Medical Center in Washington.

Unable to be on hand for the Hollywood ceremony, Jose (Cyrano de Bergerac) Ferrer flew down to San Juan to get his 1950 Oscar from the hands of Governor Luis Munoz Marin. Native son Ferrer then presented the Oscar to the University of Puerto Rico in the name of his late father, a prominent local lawyer.

Dressed in a new dark tunic, Joseph Stalin made his fourth public appearance within a month. Occasion: the opening session of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, where the Vozhd listened for an hour and a half to the 1951 budget speech. His other sorties: two meetings of the All-Union Supreme Soviet, and a trip to the Bolshoi Theater to see a new opera, based on Novelist Elizar Maltsev's From the Depths of the Heart.

After a toast from his loyal subjects at a Lancashire County council luncheon, King George VI gave them a reassuring response: "I appreciate the way in which you have drunk my health. I am sorry that it underwent a temporary setback last month [a deep cold], but I can assure you that it is now entirely worthy of your confidence."

In Cairo, pudgy King Farouk proclaimed that his wedding next month to Narriman Sadek would be a simple affair in keeping with the grave state of the world. The bride-to-be was doing her part to help. She had held down her Paris trousseau to 30 dresses, 30 pairs of shoes, a few crates of hats and a $2,800 wedding veil.

We Happy Few

Two days after Lex Barker, cinema's tenth Tarzan, signed a marriage license to wed flame-haired Cinemactress Arlene (Watch the Birdie) Dahl, she suddenly called the whole thing off, flew back to Hollywood in a huff. Tarzan followed in another plane, found her, and promised breathless tabloid readers a happy ending as they headed back to Manhattan together. Explained Arlene: "What actually happened was that two dog-tired people just emotionally exploded over a simple misunderstanding."

The government of India took a dim view of one of its major maharajas, the wealthy Gaekwar of Baroda. Charging, among other things, that he was promoting princely rebellion against the republic, and had not accounted for almost $5,000,000 of his princely state funds, the government ordered the Gaekwar stripped of all royal titles, plus his half-million-dollar annual pension (leaving him with an annual income estimated as high as $8,000,000). The former ruler of a princedom of 8,000 square miles and some 3,000,000 subjects has a month in which to appeal the decision.

In Abilene, Texas, with ten other immigrants, Irish-born Greer Garson (now Mrs. Elijah E. Fogelson) took her final oath of U.S. citizenship with tears streaming down her face. "I am so happy about being an American now," she said, and explained the tears. Just before the ceremony, she had stopped to wash a cinder from her right eye. Reaching for some eye lotion, she grabbed the wrong bottle, gave her eye a burning bath of perfume.

Hope Hampton, who traded a silent-screen career for a life of diamonds and mink as the wife of the late multimillionaire Banker Jules Brulatour, came home to her four-story Manhattan house to find a few trinkets missing. Burglars had walked off with some $300,000 worth of uninsured jewels, $15,000 in cash and a $15,000 mink coat. Wearing a mink cape, a cluster of diamonds in her hair, and flashing a 23-carat, $100,000 diamond ring, she could not tell detectives for sure if anything else was stolen because "I have so much scattered around." The trinkets were recently taken from a bank vault, she explained, for a safer country hideaway. "I was worried about the atom bomb."

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