PEOPLE

Names make news. Last week these names made this news.

Cinemactress Marilyn Monroe demonstrated that whether ambling down a street or lying flat on her back, she is bound to cause talk. It happened when Marilyn, normally in admirable shape, stayed away from the London set of The Sleeping Prince for a few days and word got around that a gynecologist had gone to see her. Instantaneously, England's press corps, abetted by its American peers, jumped to the conclusion that Marilyn was expecting a baby. Not so. Racing back to his bride from a brief visit to the U.S., Playwright Arthur Miller pooh-poohed the baby talk. "Absolute rubbish!" cried he. "I would know if my wife were expecting a baby. She is ill with gastritis, that's all. She often gets a tummy ache when she's making a new film."

A long-playing RCA Victor record, The President's Favorite Music, went on sale with Mamie and Ike smiling happily at buyers from the cover of the album. The President's musical taste: eclectic. Its range: from Johann Sebastian Bach's We All Believe in One God to Do Not Forsake Me, theme song of the movie High Noon.

Helen Gahagan Douglas, onetime actress and San Francisco Opera Company diva before she became a three-term (1945-51) Democratic Representative from California, said she was returning to her first love, would give a Manhattan song recital at the end of the month.

After four rivals withdrew, big (200 Ibs.) popular Wilbur C. ("Dan") Daniel, 42, a Danville, Va. textile executive, was elected commander of the American Legion for 1957. Daniel's military record: 88 days of service at naval training in 1944 terminated by a medical discharge.

Back in Manhattan after a holiday in Europe, Broadway's youngest (18) star, Susan Strasberg, returned to the title role in The Diary of Anne Frank before quitting Broadway for the starring role (and at least $75,000) in RKO's Stagestruck, a remake of Morning Glory, which established the stardom 23 years ago of Cinemactress Katharine Hepburn.

In Atlantic City, before 22,000 rapt spectators, an annual rite was performed. After a select group of American beauties had paraded their assets for all to assay, South Carolina's blonde, blue-eyed Marian Ann McKnight, 19 (assets: 35-23-35; dividend: a singing imitation of Marilyn Monroe), was handed a queenly scepter and crowned Miss America of 1957. After sobbing a moment, but not at the thought that her title will net her close to $75,000, the queen threw her head back and said: "Who would have thought this could happen to me?"

Bearded Randall Jarrell, new consultant in English poetry at the Library of Congress and something of a poet himself (TIME, April 26, 1948), announced that a mechanical contrivance--the high-fidelity phonograph--has brought poetry back into American life. Suggesting that Edna St. Vincent Millay was the last contemporary poet to be read by young men to young women in canoes, Jarrell quickly added: "I'll bet that last night hundreds of young men were playing Dylan Thomas to hundreds of girls in Greenwich Village." Jarrell also insisted: "Most modern poetry isn't modern any more. The new poets scan. They have rhyme and rhythm. The idea that they are wild and woolly is no longer true. Today the young poets are tame and fleecy."

TV Star Bess Myerson, Miss America of 1945, played a real-life role in two acts. In Act I she appeared in a Manhattan court to fight her handsome husband for the custody of their nine-year-old daughter Barbara, who sat on a bench between them, kissing both impartially and seeming not to notice that her parents would not look at each other. In Act II Bess got custody of her ponytailed daughter, but with the father's visitation rights still undetermined. The judge cautioned the parents "not to fight to the last drop of the child's blood because of a disagree ment between themselves."

A father two years ago at 75, France's vigorous, diminutive wartime Premier Paul Reynaud, who has tried most means of locomotion, from balloons to submarines, and many forms of sport, experimented at 77 off Saint-Tropez with a combination of both: water skiing.

Announcing that her health was even better than a year ago, that she had kept out of trouble by keeping busy finishing 25 oils, famed American Painter Mrs. Anna Mary Robertson ("Grandma") Moses, with the help of two sons, eight grandchildren and two dozen great-grandchildren, celebrated her 96th birthday, confident that she would live to be 100, in her home at Eagle Bridge, N.Y.

Soon after Widower Bing Crosby, 52, Hollywood's richest (reportedly $15 million) bachelor, requested and was granted by Columbia Pictures the release of his friend Cinemactress Kathy Grant, 23, from a movie role, the rumor blazed through Hollywood that they would be married. "Nothing to it," snapped Bing. "I'm not planning to get married to Miss Grant or anybody else. Also I'm getting fed up with rumor stories."

In Manhattan, Cinemactress Elizabeth Taylor, 24, was seen about town on the arm of cigar-chomping Producer Mike Todd. Asked what her intentions were, Liz heaved a mighty sigh and panted, "I love Mike, I love him passionately." This reminded some listeners that before she left for Italy to make a movie, Marlene Dietrich used to murmur in a more continental accent, "I love to cook for Mike. I love to cook him sauerkraut." At the Stork Club, when Mike refused to be photographed with Liz, she posed alone, looking demure in a Grecian gown. In London, meanwhile, friends of Liz's second husband, British Cinemactor Michael Wilding, from whom she is separated, said a divorce was being planned. "It isn't the Todd romance that hurt Wilding," they commented. "It's the one before it."

Bushy-bearded Bachelor George Hoiden Tinkham, unreconstructed Republican Congressman from Massachusetts who died last month at 85 after valiantly though unsuccessfully battling child-labor reform, left $2,000,000 to the Judge Baker Child Guidance Center in Boston, the largest single grant ever given to any organization dedicated to child psychology.

Asked if he considered it possible that he would ever again play a role in American politics. Earl Browder, 65. head of the Communist Party. U.S.A.. during its 14 most powerful years (1931-45), drew thoughtfully on his pipe and replied: "Realistically, there are no grounds on which anyone could base such a prediction."

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