Names make news. Last week these ames made this news:
Wisecracking Pianist Oscar Levant, 47. once described by Playwright S. N. Behrman as "a character who, if he did not exist, could not be imagined," had a headline-making spat with his wife June in Beverly Hills. June walked out. Figuring that she had gone home to mother. Oscar tried to phone her there, was told by the local operator that the line was busy and that he would have to wait half an hour. Cried Oscar: "In half an hour I'll be dead!" Said the operator, soothingly: "Hold on. I'll help you." "Gee, I've found a friend," said Oscar, who once confessed that his troubles revolved around "acute anxieties, ritualistic compulsions, substitutive obsessions and irrational hostilities." He was still holding on to the telephone when cops smashed in and mistook a vial of paraldehyde (sometimes used to unpickle the living) for a vial of formaldehyde (often used to pickle the dead). After being hauled off to a first-aid hospital where his stomach was pumped out, Oscar explained: "I was just trying to be dramatic." Said June: "He was just kidding."
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At a dinner in Chicago, as an award from Roosevelt College for his "distinguished services to the principles of American democracy," America's No. 1 Democrat Adlai Stevenson was given a bronze bust of Franklin D. Roosevelt. "Now that I have his head, no telling what I might do," cracked Stevenson. "I only hope I don't lose mine."
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Fretting over how posterity would remember him, the late George Bernard Shaw left his country cottage at Ayot St. Lawrence to a national trust in the hope that the place would survive him as a shrine. But he left not a shilling for its upkeep. For a year after G.B.S.'s death in 1950, visitors came in swarms at two bob a head, and made the place selfsupporting. But as memories of Shaw faded, so did attendance. Last week the trustees announced that the Ayot cottage, not hallowed enough to pay its own way as a monument, will be rented, unfurnished, in September.
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After one shocked look at his invitation from Chicago's Irish Fellowship Club to come to a St. Patrick's Day banquet, Democratic National Chairman Stephen Mitchell decided that even Irishmen can carry fellowship too far. The scheduled after-dinner speaker: Wisconsin's Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). After turning down the bid, Chicagoan Mitchell wrote: "I will not break bread with a man who has borne false witness against over 30 million Americans."
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In Brussels, Belgium's deposed King Leopold, 52, and wife the Princess de Rethy, took a plane for Central America, where, as the official explanation went, the King will make a study of exotic jungle birds. More practical reason for the expedition: Leopold, on whom many Belgian monarchists still dote, deems it wise to be elsewhere during this April's national elections.
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Looking very tanned and fit, William O'Dwyer, 63, onetime mayor of New York City and former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, where he is now working as an "immigrant" lawyer, popped off a plane which landed in Miami at dawn. O'Dwyer was merely going to visit some Florida friends for a couple of days, although he "wished" he had time to head farther north so that he could give his personal regards to Broadway.
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At Manhattan's Public School No. 47. Mme. Celal Bayar, wife of Turkey's visiting President, got a lesson from a little deaf girl on the technique of hearing through fingertips placed on a speaker's throat. Next day, after four quietly bustling weeks in the U.S., the Bayars sailed for home.
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After serving nearly 17 months of his four-year sentence for conspiring to terrorize the North Carolina countryside. Thomas L. Hamilton, 46. retired Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, left the state prison on parole, planned to work as an automobile salesman in Georgia.
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In Arizona for his usual wild & woolly kind of vacation, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, 55. headed off into the Chiricahua Mountains to prey upon the local fauna. His bag: a 7 1/2-ft. (whiskers to tail) male mountain lion, which he lassoed, then shot, and a 7-ft. female cougar, which he plugged in a tree from 35 feet with a .22 pistol.
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Hearst Columnist Westbrook Pegler, who would just as soon disinter dead villains as cremate live ones, recalled the days when he slaved on the Denver Express. Of his old publisher boss, E. W. (Scripps-Howard) Scripps, Pegler wrote: "The wowsers and bleeding hearts of the early New Deal took up old E. W. Scripps and exalted him as a great liberal . . . Most of these trash never had done a lick in any local room and knew nothing about the newspaper business . . . Actually. Scripps was a mean, stingy, bulldozing poseur with woodchuck whiskers who took no more humane interest in his serfs than any European baron."
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