Monday, Oct. 15, 1956

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

Ian Douglas Campbell, eleventh Duke of Argyll, 53, head of the Clan Campbell, Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland, and of four assorted castles, burgeoned in U.S. magazine advertisements featuring his noble face, coat of arms and forceful autograph. The product: nothing less than Argyll socks for men, "authenticated" by the duke for the Burlington Hosiery Co. Asked about his remuneration for the plug, Argyll admitted: "I haven't the slightest idea at the moment. It depends on how many socks they sell, I suppose. But I don't suppose I'll get anything, anyway. When you're on maximum supertax, even dollars don't make any difference."

In a candid letter to the London Daily Express, which recently ran a music column headed "Is Bing Crosby Going Out --or Has He Gone?," the Old (52) Groaner groaned: "I'm 'long gone.' I just don't sing as well as I used to ... The feel for a song isn't there, the desire to sing, to be in action--and when this is absent, so is the style." Modest Millionaire Crosby was not upset by prospects of oblivion. "Honestly, I think I've stretched a talent which is so thin that it's almost opaque over a quite unbelievable term of years--30 of them actually."

British tongues wagged about Sir Laurence Olivier and Cinemorsel Marilyn Monroe, who were busy kissing from right after breakfast one morning until suppertime. It was not private smooching, but a scene, slated to grace the screen for only a few seconds, shot repeatedly for their new movie, The Sleeping Prince. The buss marathon was played big by most of Britain's daily press. A thoughtful columnist ventured an analysis of what had prolonged the action: "Marilyn --so used to the torrid clinches of Hollywood films--was nervous of the more elegant style of Olivier. She giggled coyly --and fluffed several takes."

On her five-week tour of Britain's territories in East Africa, brisk but smiling Princess Margaret was greeted on Mauritius by a fez-topped honor guard, soldiers of the Tanganyika battalion of the King's African Rifles. Later, she moved on to the spice island of Zanzibar. Censorship was instituted to tone down earthy invitations, mostly in Swahili but some in English, that are all the rage with Zanzibar's native girls, who now wear various amorous slogans written on their bright robes. By the time she drove observantly around the island, the most suggestive such bids to pitch woo seen by the princess had cooled to a tepid "Kiss Me Quick."

A grey-flannel-suited dirt farmerette from New Jersey named Doris Duke, better known as a money-marinated tobacco heiress and sometime jazz pianist, bitterly argued the merits of floribunda hedges and compost heaps in a Manhattan pretrial hearing. Her legal adversary was a sometime play producer named Luther (A Sleep of Prisoners) Greene, also something of an agrarian reformer, who claimed that Doris owed him $2,500 for applying his Greene thumb to her "tragically outmoded" 2,500-acre patch of flora in exurban Somerville. Flower Girl Duke countered that Greene was trying to make her "forget" a $1,797.45 suit she has brought against him for floral decorations grown on her farm and peddled in turn by him to Broadway shows. Doris was not irked by the petty cash involved. Snapped her attorney: "It's a matter of principle."

Brooklyn's own poetess-laureate, Pulitzer Prizewinning Marianne Moore, 68, was moved to dash off a Hometown Piece, celebrating the Dodger baseball team and urging it to repeat its last year's glory in the World Series (see SPORT). Though a pot of doggerel in comparison to Poetess Moore's finest work, Piece was nonetheless a heartfelt exhortation and, according to Marianne, could even be warbled to the tune of an old folk song that sometimes begins, "Hush, li'l baby, don' say a word, mamma's gonna buy you a mockin'-bird ..." A piece from Piece: Take off the goat-horns, Dodgers, that egret/which two very fine base-stealers can offset./ You've got plenty: Jackie Robinson/and Campy and big Newk, and Dodgerdom again/watching everything you do. You won last year. Come on.

At the behest of a Miami draft board, Gregory Hancock Hemingway, 24, youngest son of Author Ernest Hemingway, winged into Florida from British East Africa, was promptly sworn into the Army, in which Private Hemingway aims to become a paratrooper. A coffeegrower, big-game hunter and guide in Tanganyika, young Hemingway wryly confessed that he had to sell a gun and his car to raise the $800 air fare. Though he would get little chance to show it in the Army, had he inherited any of Papa's literary genius? Grinned Gregory: "I write nothing more than an occasional bad check!" What did his father have to say about Gregory's hello to arms? As far as Gregory knew, Papa hadn't even heard about it: "I hear he's in Spain, where they're going to dedicate a bull to him or something."

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