Troubled Times

Theodore Roosevelt, who grew up to brandish a big stick, got an early start as a collegiate boxer. An exhibit of photographs, letters and other TRivia that opened last week in Manhattan furnished some fierce pictorial proof: a bewhiskered Teddy in his teens in fighting rig (with scowl to match) as a Harvard undergraduate (see cut).

For three weeks, white-thatched Jesse Jones had managed to avoid testifying on some 1941 oil deals. A doctor's affidavit averred that Jones had coronary heart disease, suffered from attacks of "paroxysmal auricular fibrillation," and was in no condition to appear in court. But the plaintiff countered with an affidavit of his own. The night the medical statement was received, he claimed, Jesse had sat up until 2 in the morning playing poker with the boys, and drinking "large quantities of whiskey." The stakes ranged high, and once Jesse "backed a straight in a pot involving . . . $4,000 against four fours ... [a practice] which has never been recommended as a cure for heart trouble." Next day the judge called Jesse to the witness stand.

llya Ehrenburg, strong-arm boy of Communism's literary goon squad, got roughed up a bit himself. llya, charged the Yugoslav Writers' Union in a classic piece of Marxist doubletalk, had himself been wavering from the party line on art. In one of Ilya's recent articles, he had expressed certain "esthetic sympathies" and had supported ideas "with which leading Soviet critics and also our own do not agree."

Eleanor Roosevelt, who had dismissed the Soviet constitution as merely "of pure propaganda significance," got a lofty consider-the-source retort from Izvestia: "Can a fly eclipse the sun?"

Edward Johnson, harassed general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Co., remembering what happened at last year's opening night (those newspaper pictures of diamond-encrusted dowagers with feet on table), had hopes that things would go better this year. In a pleading letter to editors, Johnson noted that last year reporters and photographers had emphasized "undignified incidents and poses." It was particularly distressing because "neither the episodes nor the individuals involved represented the ideals of the Metropolitan nor the artistic purpose it seeks to serve."

Jean-Paul Sartre was brooding about the U.S. version of his new play Red Gloves. It had been corrupted, he grumbled from Paris, into a "vulgar, common melodrama with an anti-Communist bias," and he wanted to see and approve a copy of the script before the show officially opened. Nonsense, snorted Producer Jean Dalrymple from Boston, where the show was trying out. The Sartre play had only been shortened, and besides, it was being rewritten all the time. And what's more, she added, Boston had given it "wonderful, wonderful reviews," and it would open in Manhattan this week, as scheduled.

Idle Hours

California's Governor Earl Warren was back at his desk in Sacramento after a brief vacation in Williams, Calif. In a couple of hours, he had managed to bag the two-bird limit of pheasant, and pose for a hearty sportsman picture.

The U.S.S.R.'s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Gromyko, was back in Moscow, after a two-month vacation in the south of Russia.

The Vatican's Pope Pius XII was back in Rome, after four months in summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.

The Boston Red Sox's thumping Ted Williams, already nearly two months into his five-month vacation, stopped off in Hayward, Wis., took the kind of strike he likes the best, proudly displayed the result: 21 pounds, 32 inches of musky.

Rich young (32) Publisher Michael Straight (the New Republic), a wartime B-17 pilot, ran into a snowstorm while flying from Cleveland to Washington, landed his Navion and three passengers safely in a Virginia cow pasture.

Painter Georgia O'Keeffe, 61, dropping in to a Manhattan exhibit of portraits of prominent people, posed briefly beside a portrait of a younger Georgia O'Keeffe (painted 40 years ago by promising Fellow Art Student Eugene Speicher).

Bobby Breen, onetime inescapable boy soprano of the movies, now 21 and an obscure nightclub tenor, was back again. On a Wisconsin hunting trip (he neglected to take along a gun), his plane was reported lost. All night long, search parties slogged through the snow, and press services hummed to keep front pages posted on Bobby's peril. Next day he turned up safe & sound at a Glidden, Wis. hotel. His plane had run out of gas, he explained, but landed safely near by. Was it all just a publicity stunt? Please, he begged reporters: "Get it right, will you? Tell everyone it wasn't a gag." After some prodding by the sheriff, Bobby kicked in $300 to cover expenses of the search.

The Laurels

In Manhattan, Novelist William Faulkner, 51, got the nod from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: he was elected to fill one of 1948-5 four vacancies.-His three fellow neophytes: Novelist John (The Grapes of Wrath) Steinbeck, 46, Painter Leon Kroll, 62, crop-haired Litterateur Mark Van Doren, 52.

Radio's Fred Allen, having by now offi cially made good, was awarded the James E. Downey medal (given each year by Boston High School of Commerce alumni to an outstanding alumnus). Alumnus Allen couldn't make the reunion for the formal presentation. In a note apologiz ing for his absence, he expressed con siderable hesitation about accepting the medal: "I assume it is made of metal.

With the present shortage of housing ma terials, this metal might have made a doorknob. How will I feel if I read . . .

that a veteran, with his wife and children, is standing in front of a new house? In side, the house is complete, but the vet eran cannot enter the house because the builder ran out of metal and there is no doorknob . . . Can I face that veteran, knowing that I have his doorknob, the James E. Downey medal, in my pocket?"

The British public regards Joseph V.

Stalin, Vyacheslav M. Molotov and Harry S. Truman, in that order, as the three men "doing the most harm in the world today," according to a poll pub lished in the London weekly News Review.

Molotov and Truman were "usually men tioned together [along with Foreign Sec retary Ernie Bevin] as power politicians."

The three ranking do-gooders: Sir John Boyd Orr, onetime head of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization ; George C.

Marshall, and Sir Alexander Fleming, the doctor who discovered penicillin.

In Hollywood, a sculptor named Yucca Salamunich, after carefully considering the subject of legs, was ready to make a generality: "Yunnhh! Hollywood con nects legs with sex. Legs have beauty for other reasons." Specifically, Salamunich had prepared a list of legs he admires:

i) Hedy Lamarr ("What I'd call a heavy leg ... good construction") ; 2) Alexis Smith ("willowy"); 3) Ray Bolger ("A good dancing leg ... Legs don't have to be a woman's to be beautiful"); 4) Nightclub Singer Julie Wilson; 5) and 6) Citation; 7) Jane Russell, whose pret ty legs have been "overshadowed"; 8) a Chippendale chair.

*Left by the deaths of Historian Charles A. Beard, Educator Nicholas Murray Butler, Critic Royal Cortissoz, Scholar-Editor-Politico Wilbur L. Cross. A.A.A.L. membership (which is for life) is limited to 50.

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