Monday, Aug. 16, 1954
Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
At 9:14 on a sunny morning in Reno, Barbara Jievute Paulekiute Sears ("Bo-bo") Rockefeller, excitedly chomping gum and convoyed by nine lawyers (only seven hers), two bankers and a pressagent, walked into a judge's chambers. Fourteen minutes later, she emerged as a new proof of an American dream story. After six years of marriage (her second), nearly five of separation, sporadic salvos of parting shots, Bobo, blonde, 37, was no longer the wife of Winthrop Rockefeller, 42. Her record settlement jackpot: $2,000,000 in cash, $3,500,000 in trust funds for herself and little Winnie, 5. One of Rockefeller's lawyers beamed at her: "You carried yourself like a trouper." Exulted one of Bobo's own lawyers: "It's wonderful . . . No hard feelings. No recriminations." Murmured a less cheery court bailiff: "The big gold rush of 1954."
Bobo had no idea how fast the gold would rush ("I haven't had time to figure it out"), but she was in a mood to celebrate. One evening later, coquettishly holding hands with Reno Hotelman Charles Mapes, Bobo showed up at a big stone castle on Lake Tahoe, where an even richer lady, Elsinore Machris Gillilan, a bride of 70 who inherited $20 million from her previous oil-drenched husband, was tossing a small, make-believe Hawaiian luau (a beach wassail where revelers cry "Oahu!"). There was no poi or okolehau, but there were oodles of orchids and leis, flown in from the Islands, and, ignoring Tahoe's sparkling waters, lackeys gassed up a swimming pool by spiking it with champagne. Mrs. Gillilan's newly rich bridegroom, Ray, 60, wouldn't say what the party cost (estimate: $30,000). But the gala seemed just what Bobo needed to relax after her six weeks of idle seclusion in Reno.
Shortly after dawn cracked over the waking town of Independence, Harry Truman, in his first public sally since his illness, popped out of his house, strolled a block to become the day's third voter at his precinct in Missouri's primaries.
Veteran Cinemactor Lew (All Quiet on the Western Front) Ayres, 45, whose militant pacifism led him into the noncombatant ranks of World War II's conscientious objectors, passed through Istanbul after a half-year's sampling of Asia's welter of religions. He planned, with the aid of some 75,000 feet of movie film shot during his pilgrimage, to lecture on his findings in the U.S. Of all the religions he had looked over, Ayres liked Mohammedanism best as an ideal faith for world brotherhood. Said he: "You go to pray. You go in turn. No color difference, no difference between rich and poor. You all believe in one God and you are all equal in His presence."
In Placerville, Calif., a cop succeeded where many an oldtime American League catcher had failed: he caught baseball's famed Georgia Peach, Ty Cobb, 67, trying to steal home (to nearby Nevada). Booked for drunken driving and having no license, Midnight Rider Cobb was soon sprung on $315 bail.
Interviewed on NBC-Radio's Tex Si-Jinx chitchat show, irascible Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, 85, tried to assess the merits of an old acquaintance, New York's irascible Master Planner Robert Moses, 65. Said Wright: "Bob Moses is the boy who does great work for New York City, and then when he talks about architecture, he's in a covered wagon going back to Babylon . . . The first time I met Bob, he showed me a little bronze medal with a mole on one side. He said: 'I'm a mole, you see ... You're a skylark.' 'Oh, yes,' I said, 'I know what you mean: I'm up here singing away, having a good time; you're down there doing all the dirty work. But ... get this, Bob, the mole doesn't see down there, but the skylark can see, up where he is!'"
To the British royal family's motor pool was added a splashy black $19,600 Rolls-Royce limousine for Princess Margaret. Features: remote radio controls in the armrest, air conditioning, shutters to slide over the rear windows when the princess wants solitude.
Actress Marjorie Steele, 24, who met her husband, money-laden A. & P. Heir Huntington Hartford II, in a nightclub when she was a cigarette girl, proved to Londoners that talent need not be stifled by riches. "I'd like to get into something Hunt has nothing to do with," she once said. "I'll find it some day and I'll act the pants off of it!" Last week, in the title role with the London company, she had found Sabrina Fair, and most critics agreed that Sabrina was virtually pantsless by final curtain. After catching the "tall, lean, appealingly gauche and toothy girl" in the Broadway hit play's local opening, the Daily Mail's normally caustic Cecil Wilson decided that Marjorie had lost her main claim to fame as Playboy-Art Patron Hartford's wife. "Now," wrote he, "Mr. Hartford should be proud to be known as the husband of Marjorie Steele."
Pennsylvania's bald-pated Governor John S. Fine journeyed to Philadelphia, showed up on the right day but in the wrong hall to spellbind a convention of the ladies' auxiliary of the Veterans of
Foreign Wars. Next day, in the right hall but a trifle late, Fine beamed at the ladies, then heard himself introduced as "the governor of the great Commonwealth of
Massachusetts."
Taking advantage of the unspecific wording of the Old Testament,* Epicinema Director Cecil B. DeMille decided that he might properly spare the bare feet of Cinemactor Charlton Heston, who will play the role of Moses in DeMille's remake of The Ten Commandments (original version: 1923); slated for shooting on the real Biblical location in Egypt. DeMille's commandment: thrice daily for a week, for the scenes to be filmed on Mount Sinai itself, Heston will commute up and down the holy peak by helicopter.
* Exodus 19:20: "And the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai . . . and . . . called Moses up to the top of the mount; and Moses went up."
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