The Brimming Cup

"Send me cigars--they are my food," Finnish Composer Jean Sibelius had said. This week, U.S. admirers had sent him 83 boxes of cigars (plus two humidors) for his 83rd birthday. Among the donors: Tallulah Bankhead, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Carmen Miranda, Thomas J. Watson, Sergei Koussevitzky, Marian Anderson, Lawrence Tibbett. Said a spokesman for the National Arts Foundation, which is handling the collection: "We intend to keep Sibelius in cigars for life."

At 73, ex-Heavyweight Champion Jim Jeffries, who lives quietly on his farming and dairy ranch near Burbank, Calif., came out of his shell for the holiday season to serve as the town's official Santa Claus.

Margaret Truman and her father were guests of honor at the National Press Club's first father-daughter banquet. Billed as the "traveling Trumans," the talented pair played a piano duet of the Jenny Lind Polka, a tune they had first rehearsed when Margaret was ten.

The Dwight D. Eisenhowers (transfers from Washington) turned up in the new edition of the New York Social Register, along with Mrs. Winthrop ("Bobo") Rockefeller. But a new edition of a Columbia University faculty cookbook, published the same day, showed that General Ike had not lost the common touch. It contained his folksy, first-person, column-long recipe for vegetable soup, (sample subtlety: "Take a few nasturtium stems, cut them up in small pieces, boil them separately . . . and add about a tablespoon of them . . .").

Maestro Arturo Toscanini, already heavy with honors, garnered a new one. After an NBC Symphony rehearsal, an amateur photographer caught him beaming and being congratulated by onetime Heavyweight Champion Primo ("Old Satchelfoot") Carnera, now a prosperous wrestler. It developed that they are mutual admirers.

Father Divine added Philadelphia's 54-year-old, ten-story Lorraine Hotel to his flock's big, heavenly real-estate holdings. Making a visitation with his blonde wife and some of his "angels," he announced a new regime in Lorraine management: no drinking, profanity, or smoking, segregation of the sexes by floors. To a $25,000 cash deposit, the purchasing angels added cardboard boxes containing small bills. After two hours, four bank employees had counted up to $460,000.

The Silver Spoon

An exotic marriage seemed to be in store for Prince Dom Joao de Orleans e Braganca, 32, great-grandson of Brazil's last emperor, but gossip columnists could not agree on the bride. One said it would be beautiful Princess Fatima Toussoun of Egypt. Another report said that the hard-working prince, a Brazilian airline employee, would wed beautiful Fawzia, newly divorced by the Shah of Persia (TIME, Nov. 29). Neither the prince nor the lovely ladies could be found by inquiring reporters.

Japan's Crown Prince Akihito, 14, was operated on for "a slight case of appendicitis." Not the slightest complication developed, and he was reported doing well.

Princess Elizabeth was up & about, and her new infant (still nameless, he is just called "baby" by the royal family) was gaining steadily. Most of the betting said that George would be the first of his traditionally long string of names.

For charity, Denmark's King Frederik IX led the Royal Opera Orchestra through two overtures and a symphony. Thirty copies of the recordings will be offered in an anti-tuberculosis lottery, and a few others may be sold at steep prices.

Season to Taste

Hearst's Westbrook Pegler turned his pouchy eyes inward:-"If I have any bigotry in my juices, it is a rancid abhorrence of people who coldbloodedly set out to do unprovoked good to other people . . . Any person who has ever looked to me for good works has only himself to blame, for my motives always have been obviously retributive . . . and any good I may have wrought has been purely coincidental."

Emily Post, 75, chided a reporter for a breach of etiquette in asking when she was born (a date she has not given to Who's Who in America). "Where is this going to be printed?" she added. "It's for our files," replied the reporter. "Oh, an obituary. Well," ruled Mrs. Post, "if they're not going to print it until I'm dead, I don't care."

Elliott Roosevelt and his wife, Actress Faye Emerson, were again determined to "make Christians out of Christmas tree dealers." Last year they undercut upstate New York dealers by selling 20,000 trees from their Val-Kill farm at $1 each. This month, with the price up from 75-c- to 95-c- apiece, they will take 50,000 trees to Manhattan, where tree dealers have never spared the customer.

Columnist Elsa: Maxwell paused in her celebrity-collector's report to cluck over the "shameful and almost unbelievable" way the press has been hounding Sharman Douglas and the Marquess of Milford Haven (TIME, Nov. 29). To Elsa, the subject may as well be closed: "I am quite sure that she is not going to marry [him] . . . She is not in love with him . . . neither of them has any money."

In London, newshounds began to bay after 18-year-old Princess Margaret, who got home after midnight four nights last week after partying with the Marquess ("Sonny") of Blandford and other titled young bloods. After she listened to a palmist foretelling romance for Sonny, the Princess refused to have her fortune told, protesting: "Oh no, no. You're much too accurate." The tabloid Sunday Pictorial decided to be sternly parental about the whole thing: "Mothers who find it hard to regulate the hours of their daughters do not like to be told that 'Princess Margaret's parents don't seem to mind.' "

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