Alarms & Excursions

Congressman Nat ("Cousin") Patton, black-hatted, bush-browed U.S. Representative from Texas, to whom almost everyone is "Cousin,"* found an exception in Columnist Drew Pearson. Cousin Patton, just defeated in a Texas run-off primary, met Pearson in the House restaurant, promptly pulled out a brown-handled knife, began to pound Pearson on the chest. Shouted Patton: "You beat me, you beat me. . . ." He demanded that the honor of another Patton (no kin) be cleared: ". . . you stabbed General Patton in the back when you wrote that story about him. You apologize to General Patton or I'll cut your god-damned throat." Pearson was whisked out of the restaurant by protectors while Patton was seized by the wrists. Onlookers believed that Patton had never opened the knife. He bellowed: "Yeah, I'd cut out his damned throat."

Colonel John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, 40, who became the Nazis' richest U.S. prisoner when he was captured in southern France a month ago, escaped from a prison train, made his way back to U.S. lines. He told an awesome story of the destruction wreaked by U.S. airmen on German transport: the freight train on which he started toward Germany had taken eleven days to cover 80 miles, had three different locomotives on the journey. Reported a fellow fugitive: Jock was the coolest of all the prisoners, keeping up a blow-by-blow description of U.S. planes strafing the train. In sportsmanlike fashion, Whitney started a poker game in the boxcar, lost consistently. Jock said that he had such a good time he nearly forgot to escape.

Among the Muses

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, in his old attic studio in Paris' rue Saint Augustin, surrounded by pictures of blue women with square feet, declared that he had not only refused to collaborate with the Germans, said: "I even annoyed them." Said he: "They forbade my works to be shown because Hitler named me . . . decadent. But simple Nazi soldiers used to visit me. When they left I presented them with a souvenir postcard of my painting Guernica."*

Thomas Hart Benton, talkative Missouri painter, in Manhattan for the tenth-anniversary exhibition of the Associated American Artists Galleries, unburdened himself of some favorite gripes. He said he went west ten years ago to paint the lore of the U.S. pioneers, was disappointed because people did not support his work. Said he: "Hell, the group controlling the cultural institutions out there . . . repudiated me. They are rich and a rich man doesn't want to be reminded that his backgrounds are mules and manure. He doesn't want a Benton hanging on his walls; he wants a Van Dyck. . . . Don't ever get art separated from money." Grumbling that the "New York influence" dominates U.S. artistic taste, Benton said, "The same thing happened in France. . . . What the hell is Paris? A city of devices, that's all--women's fancy drawers and fancy pictures."

Emil Ludwig, portly, popular German refugee biographer (Napoleon, Beethoven), scandalized a large Los Angeles convocation of musicians and intellectuals. Ludwig, invited to pinch-hit for Orson Welles at the meeting (sponsored jointly by U.C.L.A. and the ultra-liberal Musicians Congress), had not been asked for advance copies of his speech on "The Function of Music in a Democracy." Said he: "We find that music and the arts are not necessarily characteristic of Democracy. In fact, the greatest music that has ever been composed was done so under tyrants. . . ." He mentioned Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Liszt, Franck, Tchaikovsky, Schubert -- all subjects of the Habsburgs, Napoleon, the Hohenzollerns, Bismarck, the Bourbons, the Romanoffs.

"Revolutions were ever anti-artistic. The French Revolution did not produce a single opera. Not a single opera, mind you, was composed to praise freedom." The audience began to hiss. Cried Ludwig: "I have met and interviewed three dictators [Mussolini, Kemal Ataturk, Joseph Stalin]. . . . I have found that each was a great music lover. . . ." He summed up by declaring that music, like religion, is a force that can be used by friend or foe alike. Commented the chairman of the Congress, Lawrence Morton: "It was in an excess of tolerance and democracy . . . that we allowed Mr. Ludwig to speak at all."

Margaret O'Brien, pert, hazel-eyed, seven-year-old cinemoppet (Lost Angel, Journey for Margaret), vacationed in Mexico City, wanted to see the bullfights (her mother said she was too young), instead spent her time visiting churches, said that when she grew up she would enter a convent.

* When the King and Queen of England received Congress, "Cousin Nat" greeted "Cousin George" and "Cousin Elizabeth." *Guernica is Picasso's most politically minded work, a 275-sq.-foot mural vividly suggesting the atrocities committed by Nazu airmen, fighting for Francisco Franco (and practice) during the Spanish Civil War.

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