Monday, Jul. 07, 1952

The Way Things Are

A.F.L. Musicians Boss James Caesar Petrillo was deeply annoyed when he heard that one of his boys, Conductor Artur Rodzinski, had made some unauthorized (by Petrillo) recordings in Vienna last March. Now, getting wind that Maestro Rodzinski might cut a few more longhair platters in Europe, Little Caesar thundered: "If he wants to scab, he'd better get out of the union. And if he leaves...he won't be worth a plugged nickel. He'd walk out on the stage and [our members] would walk out on him. That's what would happen to the great Rodzinski!"

Feted by the Federal Bar Association for his "constant and unselfish support" of Government employees, former Government Employee J. Howard McGrath, who last April was fired by the President from his job as U.S. Attorney General, recalled the Mark Twain character who got ridden out of town on a rail. The deportee's words, as quoted by Lawyer McGrath: "If it were not for the honor of the occasion, I should rather have walked."

Lush Cinemactress Marilyn (Clash by Night) Monroe played an indignant role in a Los Angeles courtroom as the state's star witness against two men charged with using Marilyn's name on letters hawking nude photographs of her "in every pose imaginable." Posing prettily, the onetime undraped calendar model said "no" a dozen times, thus denied any knowledge of the pornographic racket. As she explained demurely, "the pictures are of somebody else but me."

The Sunny Side

While a swarm of Vampire jet fighters in formation screamed overhead and a 21-gun salute boomed in welcome from the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle, Queen Elizabeth arrived in Scotland's capital for her first visit since her accession. After inspecting Edinburgh's Royal Company of Archers, she was presented by its captain, the Duke of Buccleuch, with the company's emblem, done up as a brooch of three golden arrows with a diamond thistle. Unable to accompany the royal entourage; the Duke of Edinburgh, laid low in Buckingham Palace by an attack of jaundice in the wake of a feverish cold.

Although a few Red-led hecklers hung about the town to shout "Go home, Acheson," Oxonians appeared hospitably disposed toward Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who, elegant in cap & gown, entered Oxford's Sheldonian Theater in a procession led by an old acquaintance, University Chancellor Lord Halifax, and got an honorary degree, Doctor of Civil Law.

From the American Statistical Association committee, which has been fine-tooth-combing his research methods, Dr. Alfred C. (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male) Kinsey drew a nod tempered by a mild frown. Rating Kinsey's approach as "superior" to "other leading sex studies," the committee still had a few reservations about the "highly precise conclusions [he boldly drew] from the limited samples." Also, even though the doctor's own figures didn't lie, the statisticians wondered about his interviewees, some of whom were possibly afflicted with "inaccuracies of memory." The committee suspects that the variable human male is not above coloring up his own sexual behavior, one way or another.

Mingling with his subjects in Arctic Lapland settlements, Sweden's touring King Gustaf Adolf joined in dunking buns in coffee while listening to pleas for electricity and schools. Then, to promote reciprocity, the Lapps presented His Majesty with a local costume, a hand-carved spear for wolf-hunting, a wooden bucket for reindeer-milking, a purse for Queen Louise.

In Long Beach, Calif, the contest judges sighed deeply and put aside their tape measures. Then they fervently proclaimed the trig Finnish entry, Armi Helena Kuusela, 18, a dimpled, honey-skinned blonde from a village close to the Arctic Circle, the most beautiful girl in the world. As Miss Universe, Armi (110 lbs., 5 ft. 5 in., 34-in. bust, 23-in. waist, 34-in. hips) won a seven-year contract with Universal-International Studios, a $3,000 Sunbeam-Talbot sport car, a $2,500 wristwatch. Later this month, U.S. athletes will find her on hand in Helsinki as an official, if somewhat distracting, greeter at the Olympic Games.

Hulking Edward F. Prichard, 37, onetime New Deal wonder boy and former general counsel for the National Democratic Committee, had his full citizenship rights restored by Kentucky's Democratic Governor Lawrence W. Wetherby. Sentenced in 1950 to a two-year stretch in a federal pen after his conviction for stuffing ballot boxes in the 1948 presidential election, Prichard got a commutation of his sentence from Harry Truman after serving only five months. He may now apply to Kentucky's State Bar for reinstatement as an older and wiser lawyer in good standing.

The Best Laid Plans

New York's Representative Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., chairman of Averell Harriman's presidential campaign committee, is technically not a Democrat because he was in Europe during last autumn's registration week. But this week Tammany Hall gave Candidate Roosevelt its big-hearted O.K. to run for renomination in New York's Democratic primary next month.

When her doctors told her she was in "a state of exhaustion," Mrs. Winston Churchill, 67, canceled all her engagements, decided to take it easy "for several weeks" at Chartwell, the family estate in Westerham, Kent.

In a Washington hospital, Connecticut's Democratic Senator Brien McMahon was on the mend after a sacroiliac operation.

In sweltering Singapore, Britain's popular Commissioner General for Southeast Asia Malcolm MacDonald shocked some of his fellow theatergoers by showing up in the proper black tie but without a dinner jacket, at a concert given by Metropolitan Opera Soprano Helen Traubel. He explained later that Singer Traubel had been given advance warning and had approved. But in London, the austere trade journal, Tailor and Cutter, taking a dim view of MacDonald's informalities, editorialized: "If we are to start revealing to the colored races the usually disappointing details of the European's physical condition, we might also reveal that we are not, after all, quite so superior as we have managed to lead them to believe."

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