The Brimming Cup

Home from an eleven-week concert tour of Europe, Bandman Duke (Mood Indigo) Ellington reported that he was 16 Ibs. lighter. The secret: "I gave up coffee, tea, and water in Germany--drank nothing but that wonderful German beer. This stuff gets inside you and you feel it's doing something good down there."

Naturalist William Beebe, 72, who once broke his leg in Venezuela and sat quietly while a five-foot boa constrictor slithered across it, admitted that he was getting a little old for jungle expeditions and bathysphere trips to the ocean depths. Having bought a house overlooking a naturalist's paradise in Trinidad, he said he would now be able to study nature in comfort: "No more of that half-a-mile-down-in-the-sea ... I'd rather be warm."

In Spain, working on a movie called Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Cinemactress Ava (The Great Sinner) Gardner, who once told newsmen that she simply hated cheesecake, had a change of heart, obligingly posed in the surf for photographers and friends (see cut).

Britain's assured Health Minister Aneurin ("Nye") Sevan was certain that socialized medicine was getting more popular with British doctors. Said he to a group of Durham miners: "I will almost make you a promise that before very long the British Medical Association will put up a statue . . . called St. Nye."

Soprano Rosa Ponselle, oldtime Met prima donna who once made a list of the qualifications of an ideal husband ("understanding, tolerant, trustful, romantic, sentimental, and businesslike"), announced that she was divorcing husband Carle A. Jackson, after 13 years.

The Working Class

"Why Charlie," exclaimed Mary Pickford as Charlie Chaplin gave her a big buss, "that's the first time you've done that in all the years we've known each other." The occasion, according to Variety: the sale, by Co-Owners Pickford and Chaplin, of 7,200 shares of United Artists stock (TIME, July 24).

After spurning repeated offers to film his life, the Philadelphia Athletics' Owner-Manager Connie Mack, 87, finally let Hollywood start work on his biography. Said he: "The picture, as I understand it, will not be based wholly on baseball, but will also contain incidents of interest to women and children."

Ex-Prizefighters Max Baer (onetime world's heavyweight champion) and Maxie Rosenbloom (onetime world's light-heavyweight champion), in Hollywood to co-star in a series of slapstick detective comedies, clownishly announced that "we have been saving our art for a major vehicle . . . We may become as inseparable as the Lunts."

Paris Dressmaker Christian Dior, creator of 1947's now dead "New Look," announced that for the winter of 1950-51 well-dressed women would have the "Guitar Look": rounded shoulders, pinched waists, pleated hips--with the "doubly curved, but classical lines of the guitar."

Cinemactress Betty Grable, 33, paused in her work on a new musical (Call Me Mister) long enough to reveal the secret for Hollywood success. Every girl, said Betty, who once pranced in the chorus herself, should "start at the bottom and work her way up."

The Literary Life

In the Atlantic Monthly, Mary Bromfield described life with her farmer-writer husband Louis (Malabar Farm) Bromfield. The contents of his pockets, she noted, were a collection "worthy of the pockets of Huckleberry Finn ... a wallet filled with checks he has forgotten to cash ... a trick pocketknife, a cigarette holder, a cigarette lighter . . . part of a package of fruit drops, a pair of Stork Club dice ... an immense quantity of loose silver . . . clippings from the ten or twenty magazines and newspapers he reads every day, as well as a collection of crumpled and soiled memoranda."

Arriving from Moscow for a two-day "peace rally," Red Editorialist llya Ehrenburg sadly admitted to London Communists that "the international atmosphere is heavy." Still, he said, Britain and Russia, hand in hand, should "find the means of keeping peace."

In London, bulky British Actor-Playwright Robert Morley, who picked up a few prizes on Broadway for his 1948 Edward, My Son, was in no mood to return the compliments. Said he at a dinner at the Theater Arts Club: "The New York theater is hag-ridden by directors. Scene painting is a lost art ... Walter Winchell and about five like him decide the tastes of the American 'people."

Aging (71) Novelist Upton (The Jungle) Sinclair feared that an H-bomb attack would destroy his 40-year hoard of literary papers. In a letter to the Saturday Review of Literature, he offered the collection to "some library or museum" for safekeeping. Where is the treasure now? "I wouldn't tell for a million dollars."

The managing editor of the Ashland (Wis.) Press thought he had a solution for the world's troubles. He urged President Truman to "place a price of one million dollars on Joseph Stalin's head."

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