The Beautiful People

Manhattan's furred & feathered cafe socialites turned out for an opening meal on the house when the Gayelord Hauser "Look Younger" Menu became a regular part of the Savoy-Plaza cuisine. Along with such unfamiliar entrees as yogurt and wild rice nut-burgers, they downed many a sample of the only cocktail recommended. "The grapefruit juice is for health," explained TV's Eloise McElhone, "and the gin is for sin." Quickly downing one himself, Dietitian Hauser strode to the microphone, proudly announced that Mrs. Betty Henderson, cafe society's 75-year-old flapper, had just marveled: "I met you 31 years ago and you still aren't fat!" "I hope," he added, "I shall never be." But when he asked his table companion to "say a few kind words -- can you?", Paulette Goddard obliged with just two: "I'm hungry!"

Landing at Paris' Orly field after a sleepless flight from New York, ailing Heiress Barbara Hutton, 38, was dismayed to find the press on hand: "Oh, why can't you leave me alone? Why are you always after me? This doesn't happen even in America . . . I feel like I'm going to faint . . . Why doesn't somebody do something? Why doesn't somebody get me a chair?"

Affairs of State

Aboard the yacht Fakhr el Bihar, accompanied by two destroyers, an ambassador, three courtiers and a staff of 50 (plus five Cadillacs and a station wagon), Egypt's Queen Narriman, 17, and King Farouk, 31, arrived in Taormina, Sicily to spend the first ten days of their two-month honeymoon. The entourage took up a 60-room wing in the Hotel San Domenico, a converted monastery, where the royal couple shared what the management refers to as "the Truman suite" (named for an anticipated visit by the President which never came off): a reception room, two bedrooms, a connecting sitting-room.

Reporters covering Margaret Truman's vacation week in London had not had so strenuous an assignment since Mrs. Roosevelt first came to town. Among the sights Margaret saw before beginning her first tour of the continent in The Netherlands: Winston Churchill at lunch, the Archbishop of Canterbury at tea, Prime Minister Attlee and the royal family at dinner, fellow Americans Spencer Tracy and Joan Fontaine on a nightclub tour.

Boarding the Swedish liner Gripsholm in Manhattan, along with an uncommonly large collection of baggage, Russia's Ambassador to the U.S. Alexander Panyushkin was off to spend a month or possibly two months, on leave or possibly vacation, in Moscow or possibly along the Black Sea coast. For reporters at the docks, Ambassador Panyushkin had only one really definite piece of news: "The Soviet Union is always for peace in the world."

Wearing a trench coat and pin-striped suit instead of his customary woven mat skirt, portly (300 Ibs.) Crown Prince Tungi, 32, arrived in Washington for his first visit to the U.S., looking more like a Western businessman than the heir to the throne of Tonga--a 150-island kingdom of 47,000 Polynesian subjects in the Central Pacific. Talking over his trip with the press, His Highness also discussed his reading habits. "I am reading everything I receive," he said, "except the London Times. It is really too long, and would take a second lifetime. So I merely mark on my copy, 'Read with interest,' and pass it along to my other ministers."

In the absence of Britain's King George, down with a lung inflammation, Princess Elizabeth, dressed in a scarlet & gold tunic and a plumed tricorne fashioned after the headgear of a 1745 Grenadier colonel, mounted a police charger, sat sidesaddle to receive the annual salute from the Brigade of Guards at the Trooping of the Color.

The Fuller Life

Middleweight Boxing Champion Sugar Ray Robinson, who has always wanted to make his name as a dancer, got a chance to exhibit his fancy footwork. Taking a night off from his boxing tour of Europe, he won a unanimous decision tap-dancing for an appreciative audience at a theatrical benefit in Paris' Palais de Chaillot.

Rome cops, investigating an international narcotics ring, were unable to prove that Charles ("Lucky") Luciano had anything to do with it, but they turned up some reasons to believe that he had smuggled in $57,000 in cash and an automobile from the U.S. If they could prove it, he would have to pay a $300,000 fine, or go to jail.

After crowning as "The Tennessee Waltz Queen" Singer Patti Page (whose recording of the song has found more than 2,500,000 buyers), Tennessee's Governor Gordon Browning stepped on stage at Loew's State in Memphis to join her in a duet which won the heart of the governor's harshest critic in another field: Memphis Boss Ed Crump. "The governor," observed Crump, "is a much better singer than politician."

Casting up the accounts for 1950, the Securities & Exchange Commission found that General Motors' President Charles E. ("Engine Charlie") Wilson was the highest-paid citizen on its list, with a $201,300 salary, a cash bonus of $363,795 and $61,205 worth of stock. Total earnings: $626,300.

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