New Twists

Florence Chadwlck, 32, who set a new women's record last year when she swam the English Channel in 13 hrs. 20 min., arrived in Dover to start training for another try. This time she hoped to be the first woman to do it the hard way, from Dover to Cap Gris-Nez.

To many requests for foreign translation rights to his bestselling novel The Foundling, the answer from Cardinal Spellman was still no. His reason: the story is "too American" to be understood in any other language.

Overcome with honeymoonshines while lunching with Queen Narriman at a seafood restaurant in Naples, Egypt's pudgy King Farouk burst into tenor solo, gave his bride a table serenade with a Neapolitan love song, in turn got a burst of applause from delighted guests.

The National University of Mexico's summer session enrolled two 10 o'clock scholars: U.S. Ambassador William O'Dwyer & wife, he to take Spanish lessons, she to brush up on native culture.

Old Hands

A friendly assembly of United Nations delegates met under the shade of apple trees in a Burlington, Vt. garden where Chief U.S. Delegate Warren R. Austin and his wife Mildred topped off the proceedings by cutting their golden wedding anniversary cake. Among the anniversary gifts: a gold thimble studded with diamonds for Mrs. Austin, a pair of gold picture frames from the White House.

Off to spend another summer among faraway mountains, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas left New York for India. Last year, nervous Russians noted his wanderings around Iran, denounced him as an imperialist spy. This year, said the Justice, "Russia has already alerted Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tibet of my visit... I am the only self-financed spy in existence, probably."

Flying from Rome to London, Comedian Red Skelton entertained a small but appreciative audience of 54 passengers, including eleven British youngsters homeward bound from the Middle East. The curtain went up when two of the four engines conked out over the Alps. While the third engine sputtered, the fascinated moppets happily watched the red-haired mimic go through 35 minutes of juggling, shadow-boxing and pantomime gags until the plane made an emergency landing in Lyon.

In London's Palladium Theater, a midnight audience paid about $50,000 to see a benefit show staged for the three children of the late British Comedian Sid Field, tossed lusty bravos and cheers at a new comic team: Sir Laurence Olivier and wife Vivien Leigh, who slipped into sailor costumes to join Danny Kaye in a popular ditty called Triplets.

In Rome, toward the end of her grand tour, Margaret Truman had an audience with Pope Pius XII, a 15-minute chat in which he sent "very special greetings" to her father, and gave Margaret a silver Madonna medal. That afternoon she sipped tea with Premier Alcide de Gasperi, then topped the day off by shaking hands for two hours in the receiving line at U.S. Ambassador James C. Dunn's reception.

Post-Mortems

To the North Georgia Methodist Conference in Atlanta, Vice President Alben W. Berkley explained how he happened to become a Methodist himself. "My ancestors were Presbyterians for six generations," said the Veep, "but I was at a Methodist college--old Emory at Oxford, Ga. I decided to become a Methodist when I was 17. I decided I could be just as good a man in the Methodist Church as in the Presbyterian Church, if I wanted to."

Judge Learned Hand, recently retired after 42 years on the federal bench in New York, turned up before a Senate subcommittee to discuss ethics in Government. Did he not think the moral standards of the country were lower now than in the days of Thomas Jefferson? No, said the judge, he did not. Even in the face of the recent gambling, basketball and narcotics evidence? Perhaps, Judge Hand concluded, it seemed so because the prizes of immorality had increased.

On a dusty shelf in the Forbes Library, Northampton, Mass., Librarian Lawrence Wikander came across a long-forgotten, unopened box with a 1,821-page manuscript, sent up by Calvin Coolidge the day before he left the White House in 1929. It was the stenographic record of his twice-weekly tilting with reporters in press conference.*Sample bout: on Dec. 11, 1928, he outlined-his plans to attend the dedication of the carillon at the Edward Bok bird sanctuary in Florida. To one reporter, unable to understand the plans for the bell tower, Coolidge snapped: "Mr. Bok is giving the bird sanctuary as a tract of land at this place. He is dedicating it as a bird sanctuary, and putting up these bells to interest the birds in music.'-

Five years after U.S. publication, readers in England were snapping up copies of the first British edition of Critic Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County. The New Statesman and Nation's V. S. Pritchett sounded a restrained critical welcome: "It is sustained in brilliance, and if it is a failure, it is a failure of an absorbing, vital, fertilizing kind, and I am glad that an English publisher has, at last, been found after many years to bring it out." As for the lurid passages which had caused the book to be banned in New York and Los Angeles, the Sunday Times critic dismissed them with disdain: "These descriptions, mechanistic and almost without eroticism, achieve a kind of insect monotony, like a boasting of beetles."

*For other news of presidential press conferences, see PRESS.

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