Flesh & Spirit

Phumiphon Aduldet, 20, King of Siam, who is going to school in Switzerland had a narrow squeak. The young Possessor of the Four-&-Twenty Golden Umbrellas* ran his Fiat smack into a truck. Out of the hospital a few days later with his cuts and bruises well on the mend, he would not know for some time whether he had permanently lost the sight of his right eye.

Sir Laurence Olivier, who throws everything he has into every role he plays, might have to slow down. He had to interrupt his New Zealand tour for a few days to have a knee cartilage fixed: he had been playing Richard III with such an emphatic stage limp that he had given himself a real one.

Oliver Cromwell, pretty much of an all-out player himself in his day, looked like a man about ready for permanent retirement. The Old Roundhead had been for 287 years on the same old pikestaff (where it had been placed for exhibition when Cromweli's body was exhumed, hanged and beheaded after Charles II's restoration). In a remarkable state of preservation, complete to a wart over the right eye, it was brought out of the bedroom chest of Canon Horace Ricardo Wilkinson in Woodbridge, Suffolk, England, for a brief public appearance.

Retirement seemed out of the question for 69-year-old Grace Coolidge. Down from Northampton, Mass., with a youngster's snap-eyed enthusiasm, the widow of the 30th President of the U.S. saw the World Series in Boston, looking for all the world like a travel agency ad plugging the good life in New England.

Words & Music

"Success," Maurice Chevalier confided to Columnist Elsa Maxwell, "is like a squirrel. Try to catch it and it runs away. Lie down in the sun, close your eyes, and hold out a nut--and perhaps . . ."

Success had been somewhat frightening to Novelist Joseph Stanley Pennell, whose History of Rome Hanks stirred up violent opinions in 1944. "Naturally I hope my new book, Nora Beckham, will have as much success as my first," he confided to Reporter Jim Goodsell for the Portland Oregonian. "But I won't mind if it creates less of a tempest. It was a little unnerving to be compared, all in one week, with Thomas Wolfe, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Judas Iscariot."

Playwright Maxwell Anderson, who once bought advertising space in a newspaper to strike back at the critics who had panned his latest play (Truckline Cafe in 1946), explained in the New York Herald Tribune why the American theater has gone to pot: "Moving pictures offer a cheap substitute; wars have damaged our morals, our manners and our taste; our whole western civilization grows doubtful of itself . . . But," he added, nursing his old wounds, "when a playwright [is] . . . publicly whipped, flayed alive, drawn, quartered . . . by every theatrical commentator, that's an experience that can drive good playwrights as well as bad into other occupations, or silence them."

William Saroyan tackled much the same problem for the New York Times Magazine: "The theater is everything it ought to be right now, but it is more frequently other things.

"The theater is what it ought to be when it is first-rate, and it is other things when it is not first-rate.

"It is desirable for the theater to be what it ought to be because when the theater is not what it ought to be it is no fun."

Eventually he got right down to the point: "The theater ought to be a number of handsome things that living itself ought to be in the first place. Is it possible for living or the theater to be these handsome things? Absolutely not, but is that any reason not to give it a whirl anyway?"

After the 17th revision on a six-year-old playscript, bestselling Novelist Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Tomorrow Will Be Better) decided that she would stick to novels: "I am absolutely through with playwriting . . . through with being the vehicle for producers' inarticulate creative writing urges . . ." Producing a novel is "not as glamorous as the theater," but it has a certain "dignity."

The Wide Open Spaces

The U.S. countryside was on a lot of people's minds.

Frank Lloyd Wright, 79, grand old man of modern architecture, thought that the Middle West would be a fine site for the nation's capital because it is "the heart of democratic impulse."

Richard Lloyd George, 59, goodwill-touring son of Britain's late Prime Minister, declared that a train trip through the Southwest "would do Uncle Joe Stalin a lot of good."

The Ali Khan, 38, deserted the cabanas of Southern France for a California house near one of the Far West's natural wonders, Rita Hayworth.

Screen Star James Cagney, 44, bought an $85,000 waterfront place in Edgartown, Mass., but denied that it was to get his children as far away as possible from "the Hollywood atmosphere."

* The umbrella symbolizes protection for the Siamese throne. Among the King's other hereditary titles: Supreme Arbiter of the Ebb & Flow of the Tide, Brother of the Moon, Half-Brother of the Sun.

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