Monday, Oct. 25, 1954
PEOPLE
Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
Noting a man with soul-piercing eyes board the same plane with him in North Carolina, the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser's Editor Grover Hall Jr. invited his fellow passenger to share a seat. Hall's recollections of this chance encounter with Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, 59, provided Advertiser readers with an unusual portrait: "As the plane revved up for the takeoff, the Bishop crossed himself . . . The editor observed the Bishop's supplication with satisfaction, considering that the plea for the safety of the ship's company was in uncommonly eloquent and influential hands . . . Airborne, Sheen deftly ripped off his collar and laid it upon his knee . . . We asked him how his tennis game was going . . . Sheen said, 'I have found that if I play tennis before going on the air, it lowers my voice at least two registers. I think that's because the exercise expands the lungs.' "
Cordiality established, Hall began plying the Bishop with questions about his general tastes. "Sheen said he gave the New York Times a five-minute scanning every day for foreign news, was repelled by politics and could never become interested in it ... Sheen has not seen a movie for eight years, cares little for drama, but relishes comedians like Milton Berle [who calls Sheen "Uncle Fultie"]. Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx are eminent in Sheen's hierarchy of devils. Sheen remarked that, 'I have read every single line that Karl Marx ever wrote. I took a year off to study him.' His discourse on Marx and Communism was so brilliant that the editor had the sense of looking into a machine gun firing tracer bullets."
Dashing Louis Arpels, a proprietor of the chic Manhattan jewelry house of Van Cleef & Arpels (branches: Paris, London, Newport, Cannes, etc.), is an international gadabout, but much of his fame has been reflected from his handsome wife, Helene, perennially in the headlines as one of the world's ten best-dressed women.
Last week Arpels basked in a notoriety all his own. Caparisoned in a trim salt-and-pepper sports suit and oodles of pearls, Helene paraded into a Manhattan court to tell a sordid tale of domestic dolor. Arpels had turned out to be a 24-carat gem dandy, complained Helene, who married him in 1933, but his diamonds were another girl's best friend. The other woman: "a mere nightclub singer named Juliana Larson." After acting distracted last year in France, testified Helene, Arpels announced to her that "he didn't have much time to live and wanted to spend it with Juliana." Shortly after that, Helene, idly rummaging through Arpels' pockets, discovered a shockingly tender letter written to "Lulu, my angel, my adored one." The letter was signed "J." Of Helene's testimony, Juliana snorted indignantly: "Just cheap, slanderous insinuations dreamed up by a former 'mere French mannequin.' " Meanwhile, Helene stuck to her demands: a separation decree and about $2,500-a-month permanent alimony--almost enough to keep a girl in clothes, though certainly not in diamonds.
Barely wrapped in, 35 yards of white chiffon, Marlene Dietrich, the only grandmother in the world who can knock down $35,000 a week by hiding an unremarkable singing voice inside a remarkable body, opened a new show at Las Vegas' Hotel Sahara. Outlined provocatively by a breeze from a giant fan, Marlene strayed blithely off key, to nobody's discomfort, in such trademarked barroom ballads as Lili Marlene and See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have. The Sahara's front room was packed with boys of all ages who had what they wanted right there.
In Dallas, Manhattan Lawyer Maurice ("Tex") Moore, 58, chairman of the board of TIME Inc.. popped up at the Texas State Fair to accept the third annual "Texan of Distinction" award (previous recipients: Standard Oil Co. (N.J.) President Eugene Holman and Chrysler Corp. President Lester Lum Colbert). The honor, restricted to Texas-born men who have won national distinction, was symbolized by a big Steuben glass vase decorated with Lone-Star motifs. On hand was Moore's mother, Mrs. Ollie Thompson Moore, 81, renowned as Texas' first woman bank president and longtime leader of the Texas P.T.A. Beaming at son Maurice and mindful of her pride in her other children (another son and daughter) as well, Mrs. Moore quipped: "We are all on speaking terms now because we used to be on spanking terms." Rejoined Distinctive Texan Moore: "She was quite direct in her methods."
Hollywood's chief watchdog over movie morals, Joseph I. (for Ignatius) Breen, 64, stepped out after 20 years as lord high censor and administrator of the industry's Production Code (except for an incongruous hiatus in 1941-42 when he quit to be general manager of the RKO studios). Ailing for the past two years, Joe Breen, in doing his thankless job, was scarcely the wet blanket that some producers, irked by his merciless cutting shears, often made him out to be. A one-time Philadelphia newsman and a Roman Catholic by birth, big, bluff Joe Breen could, and did, use such purple language in excoriating purple film passage? that few moviemen ever thought of him as a professional bluenose. Sticking always to the letter of the code, Breen would issue such blunt suggestions as, "Eliminate, wherever it occurs, the action of Spit actually expectorating." To producers who tried to cajole him into letting naughtiness slip through, he would snap, "The back of me hand to you," or worse. Breen's longtime chief assistant, Geoffrey Shurlock, 60, by all signs an equally incorruptible man, took over the job.
Comedian Charlie Chaplin, looking much better fed than the lean tramp he used to be on the screen, emerged from his self-exile in the Swiss Alps, showed up in Paris waving a check for 2,000,000 francs ($5,700), part of the $14,000 prize which Multimillionaire Chaplin got last spring from the Red-sponsored World Peace Congress for his faithful party lining. He handed the check to France's famed priest Abbe Pierre (TIME, Feb. 15), a saintly man who has been virtually penniless ever since he gave away his sizable patrimony to charity 23 years ago. "It was an important decision for me to make, whether to accept Communist money as a Christian," said Abbe Pierre bluntly. "[But] if the 'peace partisans' want to stage a war with checks for the poor ... I hope the West will challenge them, and we will see the two worlds compete with each other to solve world misery."
On a house in London's Chelsea section where several famous poems and plays were written, a plaque was unveiled, thus restoring to the playwright, after some 60 years of disgrace in England, a semblance of respectability. Its terse inscription: "Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900, wit and dramatist, lived here." On hand were Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland (who recently described his inherited stigma in Son of Oscar Wilde--TIME, Sept. 27), Actor Michael Redgrave, Poets T. S. Eliot and Sacheverell Sitwell, and Lord Cecil Douglas, grandson of the unforgiving ninth Marquess of Queensberry, whose grim insistence that Wilde go behind bars was the prime force that landed him, convicted of sodomy, in Reading Gaol.
At a Manhattan powwow sponsored by United Nations boosters to celebrate Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt's 70th birthday, Andrei Vishinsky, Russia's chief delegate to the U.N., dropped in as a surprise guest. When the festivities ended, Vishinsky warmly shook hands with one of his tablemates, a self-confessed Republican. "You are a very nice young man," glowed Communist Vishinsky. "If I were an American, I would be a Republican."
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