"There's an East Berlin and a West Berlin, but tonight we're sitting with the best Berlin," sang Danny Kaye at a gala Beverly Hills banquet where Composer Irving Berlin, 74, accepted the Milestone Award of the Screen Producers' Guild. It was only the second time (the first: to Bob Hope in 1962) that the Guild's award for outstanding movie achievement had been presented to someone other than a producer. President Kennedy, ex-Presidents Eisenhower and Truman telegraphed their congratulations. And then, "with great pride," surrounded by a boodle of filmdom's most glittering stars, the old tunesmith clogged every throat when he hopped to the piano to God Bless America, as only Irving can.
"I had a vision," said Sara Bartholomae, 47, "and in the vision I saw John Glenn's space vehicle.'' So the ex-beautician, who last December won a $5,500,000 divorce settlement from oil-rich William August Bartholomae, announced that she will spend $1,000,000 of it to build a church shaped like the Mercury 7 on her Brea Canyon ranch near Los Angeles. "It will be open to the public for meditation and peace of mind," says Sara. She plans to have the chapel completed by Feb. 20, 1964, the second anniversary of Glenn's triple orbit.
Occasional Actress Linda Christian, 39, onetime wife of the late Tyrone Power and self-styled "woman of the world," thought she saw a Ford in her future, but her engagement to Actor Glenn Ford, 46, was brief even by Hollywood standards. After a candlelit dinner, they both phoned their happy news to Los Angeles Columnist Harrison Carroll. Came the dawn, and Glenn was on the phone again. "Ridiculous," he snorted. They were "only kidding." Not so Linda. "Glenn proposed," she insisted. "He was so nervous he had three helpings of Wiener schnitzel. I think he should go to a rest camp." Instead, he went out with Rita Hayworth, and Linda's six-word telegram flew at his fickle heels: "Drop dead--and I'm not kidding."
The U.S. Mint clinked out 3.4 billion new coins last year, and still finds itself so short of change that it expects to produce 5.1 billion coins annually by 1970. and 7 billion by 1975. Where does the money go? For one thing, all those vending machines and parking meters, says Mint Director Eva Betrand Adams, 54, are gobbling up nickels and dimes as fast as her plants can turn out fresh ones. "However, the real culprits may be collectors." There used to be about 2,000,000 coin collectors in the U.S., says Eva, "but today there are up to 8,000,000. What's more, people once saved individual coins or rolls of coins, now they save bags full."
A bunch of the beards were whooping it up at a Greenwich Village Java saloon called The Bitter End and one of the poems recited was Ode to a Champion: Cassius Marcellus Clay. Its author? Who else but Prosodic Pugilist Cassius Marcellus Clay, 20, getting ready for his Madison Square Garden skirmish this week with Heavyweight Doug Jones. Quoth Cassius: "The word's been passed around that I'm a very charming guy./ the greatest fighter that ever lived,/ and I'll gladly tell you why . . ." Of course if he turned out to be wrong, Cassius could just call himself a beat poet.
The Philip Morris company wondered about a stockholder named Nikita S. Khrushchev. At Camp David during his 1959 visit with Eisenhower. Khrushchev accepted a free sample from free-enterprising private donors--25 shares of stock in the American Safety Razor Products Corp., later merged with P.M. But Nikita never cashed his $6.25 worth of dividend checks, nor has he turned in the A.S.R. stock worth about six new Philip Morris shares. The stocks' current value: $438, for a profit of $138 since he got it. Had he been sharper, the reluctant capitalist could have been $750 richer at the top of the 1961 market--less, of course, broker's fees and capital gains taxes.
From the Imperial Household in Tokyo came a delicate but far from inscrutable reply to those persistent rumors: "Princess is now believed to be in felicitous condition." Thus a royal secret of tennis-playing Princess Machiko, 28, and Crown Prince Akihito, 29, was declassified, and the princess trades her sporting skirts for the ceremonial white maternity sash. If a boy, the child expected in October will be third in line to the chrysanthemum throne, following Akihito and first-born Prince Hiro, aged 3.
Ill lay: Dame Judith Anderson, 65, Australian-born tragedienne, downed by flu at a motor inn in Asheville, N.C., interrupting a Southern tour of Medea and Macbeth; Walter Dowling, 57, U.S. Ambassador to Bonn, recuperating from a kidney operation at Manhattan's Cornell Medical Center; Van Johnson, 46, in a Hollywood hospital, after "very successful" surgery for a skin cancer on the left thigh; Celal Bayar, 79, former Turkish President imprisoned since the 1960 army revolt, removed to an Ankara hospital suffering from low blood pressure.
Her vital statistics, says a flack with a flair for figures, are Gorgeous-23-Gorgeous. And in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, black-haired, blue-eyed Actress Tracy Reed, 21, gets a chance to prove it, though her role is nearly as brief as the bikini she wears playing "Miss Foreign Affairs," a twisting Pentagon playmate. With a background of stage and TV experience, plus Kubrick, plus the counsel of her stepfather, British Director Carol Reed, Tracy's movie debut seems an assured success. "Now," she says, "maybe Daddy will let me be in one of his."
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