Change of Scene

When one motor of their chartered twin-engine Lockheed conked out 60 miles from Columbus, Ohio, Vice President Alben Berkley and a planeload of Washington brass, including Attorney General Tom Clarlc, Postmaster General Jesse Donaldson, and Air Secretary Stuart Symington, made a safe emergency landing. After an hour's delay at Columbus, they commandeered a Navy plane and took off for St. Louis to keep a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner date. Next day the Veep flew on to Los Angeles in a regular commercial airliner.

"Princess Margaret has no idea of going to the United States at present," replied her lady-in-waiting to an invitation from the Ogdensburg, N.Y. Chamber of Commerce. "In fact, it would be quite impossible for her to do so" (the letter did not explain why). But anyhow, the princess sent her thanks to Ogdensburg, and wanted the Chamber of Commerce to know "how very much she would like to accept."

Sharman Douglas, 20, blonde daughter of the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, all dressed up to take in a new movie (the world premiere of Christopher Columbus) at London's Odeon theater, stopped for a moment amid popping flashbulbs for a curtsy to Queen Mary, grandmother of her friend Princess Margaret, as Sharman's own mother beamed approval.

John Jay McCloy, new U.S. high commissioner of Germany, had to reshape his plans for a leisurely trip to his new post. John Jr., 11, and Ellen, nearly 8, insisted on taking along the family pets (Hansel, a canary, Judy, a boxer, and Punchy, a beagle). But Britain's six-month rabies quarantine presented a problem. Diplomat McCloy decided to send the wife and kids and Hansel on to Britain by boat. To avoid the British quarantine, he would fly nonstop from the U.S. to Germany himself, personally escorting Punchy and Judy direct to their new home.

Clara Bow, 43, "It" Girl of cinema's flapper era, better known to a later generation as radio's first "Mrs. Hush," would come out of retirement, briefly, for a stage appearance. The show: a Santa Fe straw-hat production of Personal Appearance. Her role: a man-crazy movie actress on tour. Now the wife of a rancher (ex-Movie Cowboy Rex Bell) and mother of two children, Clara was doing it strictly "for fun." A Hollywood comeback later on? Not a chance, said she: "I had my babies and I like the life in Nevada . . ." After the show, she would hurry right back to the kids (now 14 and 11) and more retirement.

"Like watching the March hare playing tricks on an indulgent mad hatter," said the Manchester Guardian of Harpo & Chico Marx, now appearing on the London stage (Groucho was at home). The London Times burbled: "What makes these great clowns is this combination of fun and fantasy with something else, a mixture of worldly wisdom and naivete, of experience but also of an innocence never altogether lost, of dignity and absurdity together, so that for a moment we love and we applaud mankind."

Novelist Graham Greene did not look like a particularly sound business risk to his British bank. "One department . . . still appears to regard us [writers] as an inferior race, or at least as distinct out siders," Greene complained bitterly in a letter to the London Times. "I asked ... for the usual businessman's allowance of -L-10 ($40) a day to keep me in New York during the [35 day] period of writing [a dramatic version of the best-selling novel, The Heart of the Matter]. The bank . . . however, tells me that they cannot afford to 'gamble on an unknown quantity to the extent of -L-350.' . . . [It] offered to sanction a daily allowance of -L-4 on which it is impossible to live and work in New York ... I have therefore had to cancel my contract . . . One wonders how many other authors have been prevented in the same way from earning dollars for this country."

Inside Sources

"My advice to you," said Harold Ickes, 75, to the graduating class at Radcliffe College, "the best advice that I can give --the only advice, probably, that is worth giving--is that you be chary about taking any advice whatever from people of my generation."

Cinemactor Tyrone Power, flitting here & there about Europe on an extended honeymoon with his bride of five months, Linda Christian, proudly announced that they were expecting a baby in January.

Mrs. Grace Hemingway, mother of Author Ernest Hemingway, reported: "59-3% of the critics and professors consider Ernest's books among the finest of our times, but I think the essays he wrote as a schoolboy were better."

"Surrealism in art is practically finished, at least until the surrealist can recapture the technique of the old masters," noted Salvador Dali, off to produce and direct a neo-mystic movie in Spain. "My ambition now is to combine surrealistic ideas with old classical techniques. It is a completely new approach." His future subject matter? "The integration and disintegration of matter as applied in physics."

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