Inside Sources

"When I finish a book," said Pulitzer Prizewinning Novelist Robert Penn (All the King's Men) Warren, "I feel as I imagine a parachute jumper must feel when he first bails out. He doesn't know for sure that the damned thing is going to open." Did he land safely with his newly published World Enough-and Time? "Yes . . . You always think the last book best."

The war in Korea reminded Princeton University officials that Korea's President Dr. Syngman Rhee has earned his doctorate there 40 years ago by submitting a thesis entitled: "Neutrality as Influenced by the United States."

"We were one of those couples everyone worried about when we were married," Actress Helen Hayes confided to Hearst Reporter Inez Robb last week, 22 years after her one & only marriage. "They thought of [Playwright Charles MacArthur] as a fantastic, wild creature and of me as little miss mouse, and they said it would never do."

On a visit to his old boyhood haunts in Port Arthur, Ont, Irish emotions welled up in the 66-year-old father of the documentary film, Robert (Nanook of the North) Flaherty: "It's very sad for me; most of my pals are gone, we're in another age." Also back in his hometown (Aspen, Colo.), shock-headed New Yorker Editor Harold Ross said that he hoped to clear up a mystery: "My mother always told me that [I was born] on the day Grover Cleveland was elected. But I've never been able to figure out why they'd have an election on a Sunday."

When an American asked him where he had picked up his English, Argentina's Dictator Juan Peron explained: "I put English records on the gramophone in the mornings while I shave."

Novelist Erskine (Tobacco Road) Caldwell admitted that he uses up more typewriter ribbon as he grows older, and that he sometimes sits at the typewriter and stares at it for three days without writing a word: "For the past two years I've been doing the same things in the same manner. I'm afraid I'm in a rut."

Roses All the Way

Trumpeter Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong, who was born on July 4 just 50 years ago, got posies and presents from well-wishers all over the world. The jazz magazine Down Beat glowed with testimonials to the great man's greatness. Old Friend Tallulah Bankhead compared him to Charlie Chaplin and Mozart. The State Department thanked him for recordings which the Voice of America beamed to every part of the globe. Satchmo was particularly cheery because he had just learned that he did not have ulcers; all he needed was to stay off his favorite food, red beans & rice. "They X-rayed me every way but running," he said, "then the doc told me I'm straight--that's my best birthday present."

To the bedside of Britain's No. 1 sufferer from hemorrhoids, Ernie Bevin, came two young Swiss trade unionists bearing a gift from their fellow workers back home: a handsome gold watch alleged to be "one of the nearest things to perpetual motion ever invented."

Cinemactress Jane Wyman, who just won Britain's annual Picturegoer's award for her performance of a deaf-mute in Johnny Belinda, told readers of Cosmopolitan magazine that women talk too much: "A girl does not lose dignity by silence. She loses it by talking for the obvious purpose of just saying something."

All in a Day's Work

At her first ship-christening, pretty Mrs. Alben Berkley smashed the bottle against the new luxury liner President Jackson with a right good will, grimaced good-naturedly as the champagne showered over her pale blue dress (see cut).

In Tokyo, a statue of the late Field Marshal Masatake Terauchi, Japanese Prime Minister in World War I, was torn down to make way for three naked women in bronze symbolizing Love, Intelligence and Will Power.

Princess lleana, sister of Rumania's ex-King Carol, was being treated for arthritis in Boston. She was also hawking her mother's crown, a silver kokoshnik (tiara) set with seven sapphires.

Silent Movie Vamp Gloria Swanson, 51, making a Hollywood comeback in Paramount's forthcoming Sunset Boulevard, revealed that she is also having a go at the literary life. Still at work on a book about "glamour over 40" for Prentice-Hall, she has agreed to write her autobiography for Doubleday.

New York's Hamilton Fish, noted before Pearl Harbor as one of Congress' loudest isolationists, announced his candidacy for the Republican senatorial nomination this fall.

Word got around that Eleanor Roosevelt had taken on yet another chore: come August, she will be the narrator for Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf to the kids at the Berkshire Festival. Meanwhile, landing in London after a tour of the Continent, she planted a warm buss on the cheek of her hostess, the Dowager Marchioness of Reading (see cut).

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