Just Deserts

Deported Fritz Kuhn, 52, prewar U.S. Bundesfuehrer, had lost some weight, but still talked as big as ever. Appealing a ten-year rap as a major Nazi offender before a court in Munich, he bellowed that the Bund had been strictly "an American patriotic organization," had used the swastika only because it was "an old American Indian design," had patterned its uniforms after the U.S. National Guard rather than the SS. As to his 1944 meeting with Hitler: "Purely a social call. If I went to England today, I would naturally like to call on King George." As a clincher, Kuhn cried: "You don't get justice in a German court," said he would prefer a U.S. court* "any time."

Poet Ezra Pound, 63, rheumy-eyed expatriate follower of Mussolini and fascism, now living out his days in a Washington, D.C. insane asylum (if he ever recovers, he will be tried for treason), won the Bollingen Prize of $1,000 for The Pisan Cantos (TIME, Oct. 25), "the highest achievement of American poetry" in 1948. The election committee, which includes Conrad Alken, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell and Katherine Anne Porter, "aware that objections may be made," explained their choice: "To permit other considerations than that of poetic achievement to sway the decision, would destroy the significance of the award, and would, in principle, deny the validity of that objective perception of value on which any civilized society must rest."

Bernard Shaw finished editing and returned a collection of 100-odd Shaw sayings to Cyril Clemens, a temerarious admirer from Kirkwood, Mo. Shaw denied some of the items, okayed others, rewrote a few more. Two he marked "untrue, but good enough to pass." Approved as straight Shaw: "I have solved practically all the pressing questions of our time, but they keep on being propounded as insoluble, just as if I never existed."

In Manhattan, the Artists' League of America carefully sized up the world's beauties, brashly issued a list of "The Most Perfect Features." The league's beauties, in order of attributes: forehead --the Duchess of Windsor ("slopes exactly right"); ears--Margaret Truman ("an exact replica of those found in Greek sculpture"); eyes--Princess Margaret ("softness is the test"); nose--Madame Chiang Kai-shek ("the less obtrusive the more perfect"); cheekbones--Jane Russell; lips--Rita Hayworth ("the test lies in the reaction of the opposite sex"); thighs --Esther Williams ("the anomalous combination of firmness and softness"); legs --Linda Darnell ("flawless symmetry").

Family Circles

In Vienna, Bridegroom Tyrone Power made an important announcement to the press: his bride, Linda Christian (she once had a movie contract with MGM, which dropped her option more than a year ago), will "have enough to do" now that she is married, and so is officially giving up her "career."

In Hollywood, Olivia de Havilland called up reporters to tell them that she and husband Marcus Goodrich are expecting their first child in August.

In Manhattan, Lady Rothermere, handsome wife of the London Daily Mail's publisher, gravely discussed a particularly distressing shortage in austere England: "The days of the old English butler are finished," she told Manhattan Gossipist Charles Ventura. The time has passed when young footmen, who normally graduate to butlerhood, "take . . . pride in their profession; they won't take the time to learn it. When this generation dies out, there won't be any new crop . . ."

Cinemoppet Margaret O'Brien, 12, who specializes in tearjerkers, played a real-life scene with all the stops out. Her widowed mother, Gladys, announced her engagement to an orchestra leader named Don Sylvio. Margaret objected with howls: on hearing the news, mother reported, Margaret "turned on the tears" and kept them at full flood for two days. Finally calmed down, Margaret read a new set of lines to the press like the trouper that she is: "I had hoped mother would wait until I am 14 and grown up. But since she wants to marry now, I'm glad it's Don. I like Don."

Change of Scene

New York's Mayor William O'Dwyer sailed from sunny Manhattan for an eleven-day vacation in sunny Havana.

Czechoslovakia's Premier Antonin Zapotocky showed up for the winter sports at a resort in eastern Bohemia.

Fretting over the shipping slump, sharp-nosed Harry Bridges, 47, boss of the West Coast longshoremen, stirred up his ulcers so badly that he was hustled off to the hospital, underwent a five-hour operation.

Broadway's Billy Rose stepped off the plane at Honolulu, cracked from beneath a yoke of traditional leis: "I feel like a well-kept grave."

The Chicago Tribune's Colonel Robert Rutherford ("Bertie") McCormick set off in his converted B-17 with his wife and a photographer for a fast look around South America.

Voice of Experience

Bernard Baruch, 78, accepting the honorary chairmanship of the Hearst national oratory contest, had some advice for members of the younger generation who aspire to be elder statesmen: "Ability and facility to express an idea is almost as important as the idea itself."

Playwright Clifford (Waiting for Lefty) Odets, 42, returning to Broadway with a bitter satire on Hollywood (The Big Knife) after seven profitable years among the moviemakers, tried to explain the creative urge: "What gets you all hot about a play? I don't know. A moment of pique, a bellyache, a week of exaltation. Who knows? ... I think most of us live like dogs--in the good sense. We are moved by appetites, helter-skelter, a run here, a sniff there. Like animals."

Lisa Kirk, who stops the Broadway hit, Kiss Me, Kate, every time she sings Always True to You in My Fashion, was deeply impressed by the famed calm of Composer Cole Porter: "A composer's work must be like a baby to him. Giving it to a singer must be like leaving it with a sitter. You'd think Mr. Porter would be on edge about it, but," she marveled, "he won't [even] quarrel with you about the baby's diet ...."

*U.S. justice in the past dealt Kuhn a $10 traffic fine in Edgewater, N.J., a $5 fine for drunkenness & public profanity in Webster, Mass., a 2 1/2-to-5-year sentence in Dannemora after he was caught with his hand in the Bund till.

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