Squints & Slaps

P: Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer squints down into the refracted psyche of a young man who craves other young men, uses his mother and beautiful cousin as bait (TIME, Jan.11). Last week a House subcommittee studying pornography and obscenity in U.S. films wanted to know how the film version of Summer had slipped past the Hollywood Production Code. "You can read homosexuality into it," testified Motion Picture Association President Eric Johnston, "or you can read incest, if you wish, if your mind goes along those channels. But I don't think there is anything like that in the picture." Reporters later asked him what he thought Williams had really been up to. Purred Eric: "It is a story of deep motherly affection ... an abnormality of deep mother love."

P: Cinemactress Gina Lollobrigida's third claim to fame-is her knack for slapping lawsuits on nearly all who cross her path. Last week she filed libel suits against two Roman Catholic priests who had published an article in the Italian Catholic weekly, Vita Nuova, reporting that when Gina had taken her three-year-old son Milko to a screening of Solomon and Sheba, she had ordered her dance of the seven veils cut from the film. "Thus the actress makes millions marketing her nudity, but doesn't want her son victimized by this market," said the priests, adding that thousands of other ragazzi would not be so protected when the flick hits the nabes. P: According to Jack Paar, who all but grew a beard when he took his Tonight show to Havana last year, many things that have been written in the U.S. press about Castro's Cuba "simply weren't true." The U.S. has been "needling that guy from the very beginning," said Paar on the air, "and I really thought it was unfair." When Hearst Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen rapped Paar, he replied that Kilgallen had been in poor international taste in calling attention to the thickness of Mrs. Khrushchev's ankles, claimed that for his part he had kept guests on his show from "making remarks about your appearance--that you have no chin."

*First two: face, fortune.

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