No Place Like Home

Oilman Glenn McCarthy's little hootenanny, opening his $21 million Shamrock hotel (TIME, March 21), turned St. Patrick's Day in Houston into a Donnybrook. McCarthy's 2,500 guests (200 of them from Hollywood) milled past dinner-jacketed newsboys at the entrance, stripped the lobby's $1,000 orchid-studded trees bare, guzzled 1,200 bottles of champagne before the banquet. Shamrocks bloomed everywhere--on ashtrays, wastebaskets, even on the panties and bras that McCarthy presented to his women guests. (The men got cowboy boots from the hides of prize cattle that provided the steaks.) The crowd whooped it up so hard that speeches by McCarthy, Texas' Governor Beauford Jester and Cinemactors Pat O'Brien and Leo Carrillo had to be put off until midnight. Rival Houston Hotelman Jesse Jones sat it all out quietly. Dorothy Lamour tried to sing in the Emerald Room, but carefree customers swore into the microphone ("Where the hell's my seat?"), and NBC cut Dottie off the air. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, sniffing through the hotel, found its long green corridors "depressing," concluded that it was a "tragic . . . imitation [of] Rockefeller Center out here on the prairie . . . There should be written in front of it, in great tall letters, in electric lights, W-H-Y?"

Manhattan's ritzy Ritz Tower Hotel went to court to persuade Actress Ruth Chatterton, 55, to stop cooking in her three-room suite. The neighbors were complaining of "powerful odors," and the management had tried without success to deodorize the halls. An attorney for the stage & screen actress who once starred in Broadway's Come Out of the Kitchen (1916), said that she was "very much annoyed" and would move.

Curly-haired, nine-year-old Symphony Conductor Ferruccio Burco (TIME, Feb. 2, 1948) was making himself at home in the fourth grade at a Manhattan school. Called "Butch" by classmates, he had built up a library of comic books, a collection of toy guns (55), and an impression that "some" little U.S. girls are "pretty."

Her Majesty Queen Mary, 81, was still getting around well enough to inspect some converted London flats being occupied by lower-income businesswomen.

Plump, red-haired Ljuba Welitsch, 35, was welcomed to the Met as a "curvaceous and arresting Salome" by the Met's onetime No. 1 glamor girl, retired Geraldine Farrar, 67. In a glowing fan letter to the New York Times, Miss Farrar took approving note of "such physical attributes as allow this singer to surmount. . . the terrific vocal demands . . ." She added pointedly: "No voice comes to full-bodied glory on a Hollywood diet, nor are lean thighs the safe caryatids upon which to rear the edifice of enduring and beautiful singing."

All in the Family

Lee Shubert, 74, who likes plenty of publicity for his 16 Broadway playhouses, was still being shy about his private life. It took a Reno divorce last September to disclose the fact that he had been married for twelve years to former Actress Marcella Swanson, some 30 years his junior. When newsmen learned last week that Shubert had remarried Marcella in February, again in secret, he informed a reporter: "I have no objection to your printing that it is an authentic rumor."

Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh left the baby Prince Charles at home and went off to judge floats in a student carnival. As winner they picked one depicting Britain's first steam railway train. The float's name: "Our Charlie."

Jack Benny's wife Sadie, known to radio listeners as Mary Livingstone and to some recipients of her checks as Mary Benny, asked a court to make the "Mary" legal.

After seven weeks of marriage, Tyrone Power flew into London with his bride, former Starlet Linda Christian, who was quoted as burbling that the honeymoon was "just a dream" and that she was "just longing for a baby so I can call him Tyrone."

Plus & Minus

Stealing a one-week march on the Academy Awards, Hollywood's Foreign Correspondents' Association named 1948's best screen performers: Jane Wyman (Johnny Belinda) and Sir Laurence Olivier (Hamlet).

Tailor & Cutter, British trade magazine, picked the Marquess of Milford Haven as "the Sartorial Year's Best Man." Anthony Eden won the "Order of the Dead Needle" as "the year's big disappointment." Even the Canadian press had described Eden as "distinctly shabby," and he had made the shocking disclosure that he no longer had a tailor. But to British tailors the most painful sight of all was rumpled Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin: "We can think of no one else in a public position who seems to pay such little regard to his clothes."

U.N. Palestine Mediator Dr. Ralph J. Bunche won the Spingarn Medal (from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) for 1948-3 highest achievement by a U.S. Negro.

Not quite two years after her death, executors of the estate of Washington Hostess Evalyn Walsh McLean asked court permission to sell some of her $591,107 worth of jewels so they could pay debts and taxes. Among the baubles: the fabled Hope Diamond, once spoken of in terms of millions, now appraised at $176,920. Last week's new figures also indicated that the McLeans bought it on credit in 1912 for $100,000 ($20,000 down, $1,000 a month).

The federal tax collector, figuring that Bette Davis owed $80,820 for 1943, filed suit to get it.

Arthur Murray dance teachers named the best non-professional dancers of the land, without saying whether they were customers. Among the favored: Joe DiMaggio, Doris Duke, Bing Crosby, Esther Williams and (for "dignity, poise and bearing") New York's Mayor William O'Dwyer and General Mark W. Clark.

Leaving for the island of Stromboli to make a film with Italian Director Roberto Rossellini, Ingrid Bergman was puzzled when an interviewer asked what the picture would cost. Between $300,000 and $500,000, she thought, but "I'm poor on numbers. I always forget a zero or add a zero where it counts most."

Chief of Staff General Omar Bradley, refreshed from a Florida vacation, found that his Pentagon office staff had given him a new gadget: a clock with an 18-hour face ("so you can work a 36-hour day").

Words & Music

Irish-born Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, speaking at a reunion of some tough Scottish soldiers, waded right into a question: Who turns out the tougher fighting man, the English or the Scots? Monty's decision: the "still somewhat uncivilized" Scots.

Television's wide-mouthed Milton Berle, who insists on getting into every act, met his match in musicomedy's trumpet-voiced Ethel Merman, who agreed to appear in his show only if he stayed out of camera range while she sang. Said Ethel: "I don't think there will be any problems. It's just in the contract, that's all."

All mankind is divided in three parts, said the Most Rev. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, in a sermon at an R.A.F. station: 1) Communists, 2) convinced Christians, 3) amiable nonentities.

Conductor Hans Kindler, all packed to leave Washington and his National Symphony Orchestra (TIME, March 21), left his critics something to chew on. They had panned his compositions, along with his conducting, but they had praised a piece called Pacific Nocturne by a Navy lieutenant, Philip Henry. Last week Kindler smilingly disclosed that Lieut. Henry is Hans Kindler.

Busy Cinemogul Sam Goldwyn, suing for partition of the United Artists studio lot, ran up against an adversary worthy of his mettle. As a co-defendant in the suit, the court named busy Cinemogul Sam Goldwyn, who leases space to make movies on the lot.

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