Monday, Feb. 21, 1955

Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

Careening about his old stamping grounds in his home town of Appleton, Wisconsin's Senator Joseph R. McCarthy closed a deal to buy from his brother Howard the old McCarthy homestead, a 114-acre farm four miles out of town. Listed price: $25,000. Two days later, the Senator made a garbled promise to the home folks: "As long as I remain in Washington, I will not be a rubber stamp for any Administration, even if they deny Mrs. McCarthy invitations to the White House [TIME, Jan. 31]."

The road company of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, starring loquacious Actor Paul Douglas as loquacious Captain Queeg, wound up its tour of the South seven weeks ahead of schedule. Reason: Mutiny Producer Paul Gregory feared "a big dip" at Dixie box offices because Philadelphia-born Douglas blabbed to a North Carolina reporter (TIME, Feb. 7) that the South "stinks" and is "a land of sowbelly and segregation."

Pfc. G. David Schine, on leave from Army duty in Alaska, and clad in well-tailored mufti, hopped off an airliner at New York's International Airport and was greeted by his erstwhile investigations sidekick, retired McCarthy Aide Roy Cohn, now a Manhattan lawyer. Reporters closed in on the two lads and tried to learn more about their reunion. But just before vanishing with Cohn into the night, Private Schine snapped: "I have stopped speaking to newspapermen."

After Sonja Henie, onetime world figure-skating champion, now a shrewd ice-show promoter, tossed a $15,000 circus costume party at Giro's nightclub in Hollywood, one of her 200 guests, who had wowed the gala by coming as himself in lace cuffs, squired Hostess Henie to another nightspot. There Sonja posed cozily, cheek to cheek, with her escort, Schmalz Pianist Liberace, still himself in the exotic resplendence of a nubbed-silk dinner jacket and polka-dot shirt.

Eight minutes after the curtain went up on the 81st performance of the Broadway hit play Mrs. Patterson (TIME, Dec. 13), the show's star, feline Warbler-Actress Eartha Kitt, departed from the script to murmur: "I can't go through with it." Then she departed from the stage. With no understudy to throw into the breach, the theater gave refunds to some 900 playgoers. Why hadn't the show gone on? Eartha, according to her agent, was ailing seriously with a kidney infection. Whatever ailed her, she was back in the show next evening, looked wan in her dressing room after beginning an indefinite routine of commuting between the theater and a Manhattan hospital.

Aboard his host's training ship Ghaleb, Egypt's Premier. Lieut. Colonel Gamal Nasser, chatted about cabals and kings and many things with Yugoslavia's ruddy Marshal Tito, recently returned from his state visit to the Far East and togged for the nautical occasion in his braid-laden admiral's uniform. Their conference lasted six hours while the Ghaleb steamed from Port Suez up the canal to the desert city of Ismailia.

Late last year, Milwaukee Playboy Robert Schlesinger, 36, son by her first marriage of Countess Mono Bismarck (long renowned as the best-dressed wife of her third husband, the late Utilitycoon Harrison Williams, and recently wed to her fourth, Count Albert Edward Bismarck), was smitten with love for worldly-wise Cinemactress Linda (Holiday in Mexico) Christian. To show that he meant business, Schlesinger began bombarding Linda, estranged wife of Cinemactor Tyrone Power, with such baubles as a $53,000 diamond necklace, a $44,500 diamond ring, and a $35,000 diamond-emerald bracelet. Linda loved every last carat of the stones. Schlesinger believed that he had met his match. He had. Last week the Manhattan firm of Van Cleef & Arpels, which sold Schlesinger the jewelry, sued Linda for return of the loot. Reason: Schlesinger's $100,000 check, for payment on account, had bounced. So had Linda, who told Van Cleef & Arpels that she would not part with Schlesinger's little tokens, no matter what.

Intrigued by Schlesinger's folly, New York Journal-American Gossipist Igor ("Cholly Knickerbocker") Cassini reported more odds and ends of the romance : "Schlesinger . . . gave [Linda] $25,000 in cash, diamond earrings for $9,500 (paid for), and then those other trinkets . . ." and there was more largesse, according to Cholly: an idyllic holiday in Mexico for Linda, her mother, sister, and two of her casual lady friends (it included a bungalow for each of them at Cuernavaca's flossiest hostelry). Cholly wound up with a crocodilian lament that "in exchange for all this mad generosity Bob didn't even get Linda's affection." In Hollywood at week's end, Linda still clung fondly to her gifts. With Linda reportedly all set to marry (after her divorce from Power) British Cinemactor Edmund (The Egyptian) Purdom (after his divorce), guileless Fun-Lover Schlesinger was clearly the odd man out. Groaned he: "Things like this are no fun."

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