Old Campaigners

In Manhattan, where he received the Touchdown Club's annual award, Old Fan Douglas MacArthur viewed with alarm the present state of U.S. football. "My only concern," he said, "is that it does not fall within the eager clutches of rapidly expanding federal controls. If I were to give you but one word of warning, it would be to keep football and, for that matter, all other sports, free of governmental bureaucratic regulations . . . The game would no longer be a sport; it would be another of our lost freedoms, a plaything of selfish politics, a helpless adjunct to a creeping centralization of power in a government which threatens athletic life, fortune and sacred honor."

Rudolph Halley, who graduated from his job as a Kefauver crimebuster to the presidency of New York's City Council, thought he saw a way to save some city money. He voted to pay the bills for some recent civic receptions (including $5,488 for Italy's Premier de Gasperi, $2,856 for Sir Denys Lowson, Lord Mayor of London), but recommended a future ceiling of $50 for official greetings. Said he: "If we give parades to everybody who comes here, the celebrations lose significance." In most cases, "we can all go out on the steps of City Hall and shake hands and blow a bugle."

Toil & Trouble

Senator Joe McCarthy, whose specialty is combing the files for dirt in his one-man Red hunt, dusted off his typewriter to ask the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections to call off its study of the early McCarthy career. To Chairman Guy Gillette he wrote: "Over the past months it has been repeatedly brought to my attention that a horde of investigators, hired by your committee at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money, has been engaged exclusively in trying to dig up on McCarthy material covering periods of time long before he was even old enough to be a candidate for the Senate, material which can have no conceivable connection with his election or any other election."

In Manhattan, Orchestra Leader Guy Lombardo finished his nightly stint at the Roosevelt Hotel, headed for his home in Long Island and drove his sleek British Jaguar straight into a traffic tragedy. Result: one man killed, a woman seriously injured. Lombardo was released without being charged; the pedestrians had apparently stepped into the street against a traffic light.

Hollywood noted with passing interest a sharp example of the vagaries of fame & fortune. Thirty-one years ago Jackie Coogan, a big-eyed youngster in a floppy cap, shot to stardom in Charlie Chaplin's first feature-length picture, The Kid. Last week, bald, broke and all but forgotten, Coogan, 37, took what he could get in the way of a film job: a cowboy character part in a grade B western. Chaplin, now rich, white-haired, often mated (to four wives) and much berated (for his pinko leanings), announced that he had played the part of the Tramp for the last time. To Columnist Sidney Skolsky he said: "I've retired him. I'll never play him again, because he's got nothing more to say. I've been playing him for over 35 years. I no longer have any enthusiasm for him."

The Bright Side

In Paris, the cabinet unanimously proposed that the ashes of Louis Braille, blind friend of the blind, who died in 1852, be transferred from his native village of Coupvray to the Pantheon and a place of honor "among the illustrious benefactors of humanity."

In the Rome studio where she is making Europe, 1951, her first movie since Stromboli, Ingrid Bergman watched the cameras turn on another star. Her husband and director Roberto Rossellini arrived with their son Robertino to make some pictures for the family archives. After shooting 600 feet of film in which Robertino, who will be two years old in February, took a silent but active role, photographers took a picture of the chubby-cheeked little celebrity for the public to see.

Publisher Colonel Robert R. McCormick, all decked out in a fur overcoat and sugarloaf fur cap, arrived in Baie Comeau, Quebec with his wife, Maryland, who touched off a 36,000-lb. dynamite charge at the future site of the McCormick Dam on the Manicouagan River. After the dam is built, plans call for a new hydroelectric plant, to power a newsprint mill which will turn out more paper for his Chicago Tribune.

At the annual membership luncheon of the Metropolitan Opera Guild Actor Alfred Lunt, who agreed to direct Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte for the Met, described his reaction to his first assignment in grand opera: "I felt like the bridegroom at a shotgun wedding except that I had never seen the girl. I knew her brothers and sisters, of course--Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro--but I had never met Cost." Once the acquaintance was made, however, he had decided the opera "should be a sort of celestial review sung by uninhibited angels."

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