Monday, Nov. 18, 1957
Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
After producing three children and five bad movies, Actress Ingrid Bergman, 40, and Italian Director Roberto Rossellini, 51, signed a legal separation agreement in Rome. Winding up seven years of a waning marriage, Ingrid prepared with visible relief to resume her film career in England. At week's end Romeo Rossellini had vanished toward the north of Italy.
At a reunion with veterans of Britain's disastrous World War 1 Gallipoli invasion, Earl Attlee, 74, onetime Laborite Prime Minister and himself a British army survivor of Gallipoli, paid more than tribute to a former political adversary, ex-Tory Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, 82. Churchill is generally still held accountable by historians as the master misstrategist behind the Gallipoli debacle (205,000 British casualties). Attlee was determined to vindicate onetime First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill: "If we had had Sir Winston instead of [Prime Minister] Earl Asquith and [Prime Minister David] Lloyd George in the 1914-18 war, he would have saved a million lives. [Gallipoli] was an immortal gamble that did not come off ... Sir Winston . . . had the one strategic idea in the war. He did not believe in throwing away masses of people to be massacred."
After unveiling a well-veiled figure of Cinemorsel Marilyn Monroe, the proprietors of Madame Tussaud's wax museum in London confirmed that the statue wears no lingerie. In a sort of sexless Statue-of-Liberty pose, the figure, neighbor to a likeness of Britain's Actor Sir Ralph Richardson, brings Marilyn the honor of being the only U.S.-born cinemactress currently exhibited by the famed museum. Only U.S.-born cinemactors on display at the moment: Danny Kaye and Alan Ladd.
Cinemale Marlon Brando, in a New Yorker profile by wispy-banged Author Truman Capote, recalled the late Cinemactor James Dean: "He had an idee fixe about me. Whatever I did he did. He was always trying to get close to me. He used to call up. I'd listen to him talking to the answering service, asking for me, leaving messages. But I never spoke up. I never called him back . . . When I finally met Dean, it was at a party. Where he was throwing himself around, acting the madman ... I took him aside and asked him, didn't he know he was sick? That he needed help? ... He knew he was sick, I gave him the name of an analyst, and he went." Another chap who still has an idee fixe about him, complained Brando, is Playwright Tennessee Williams, who cannot seem to accept the fact that Marlon is not at all like brutal Stanley Kowalski, the slobbish lecher played by Brando on both Broadway and the screen in Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. Brando's claim: a clear case of mistaken identity. Mumbled Marlon to Truman: "Tennessee has made a fixed association between me and Kolwalski. I mean, we're friends and he knows that as a person I am just the opposite of Kowalski, who was everything I'm against--totally insensitive, crude, cruel. But still Tennessee's image of me is confused . . ."
Indestructible Tallulah Bankhead, fond of regarding herself as the most outspoken lady of the U.S. theater, tersely philosophized on the contemporary T-shirt school of Methodical actors: "They're just wasting themselves. They're just learning to be a bunch of apes. They'll never be able to perform the classics or Shakespearean dramas. They're just learning how to pick their noses."
Ill lay: New York Times Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, 66, in a Rangoon hospital after being felled by a mild stroke that will probably end his current globe-girdling tour; dyspeptic Columnist Westbrook Pegler, 63, in Boston for an ulcer checkup.
At Parliament's opening, Britain's Queen Elizabeth 11, her words coming both for and from her ministers, announced that the Tory government will shortly introduce legislation creating lifetime peerages for both men and women. Such a law, if passed, would for the first time in history plunk "lady lords" down beside gentleman lords in Britain's Upper House.* This stratospheric feminist victory was hailed by "delighted" Virginia-born Lady Astor, 78, bodkin-tongued widow of a viscount and first woman to sit in the House of Commons. With due appreciation to the Queen, Nancy Astor said: "I hope they will create me a lifetime peeress!"
Slated for unopposed election this week as Jewish co-chairman of the National Conference of Christians and Jews: Investment Banker Lewis L. Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. His holdover colleagues: Catholic James F. Twohy, West Coast finance executive, and Protestant Benjamin F. Fairless, onetime head of U.S. Steel.
In the Japanese seaside village of Kawana, hell-for-celluloid Director John Huston was about to shoot a panoramic movie scene encompassing some 350 fisherfolk extras, all decked out in elaborate 19th century samurai costumes, tunics, kimonos and big wigs. Suddenly a voice bellowed in Japanese over the village's loudspeaker: "Dolphins!" Departing radically from the script, the male extras quickly put to sea in Huston's rented sampans while the women took off their film kimonos and excitedly awaited the return of their men. Net catch for the inscrutable villagers: 270 dolphins worth $3,500 in the seafood market. Net loss to the scrutable Huston (who filmed the unscheduled slaughter for the celluloidal hell of it): four men's wigs, a half day and $15,000 in shooting time.
*In Britain's hereditary peerage 24 women really own their own titles, but may not now sit with their male peers.
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