PEOPLE

Cornered by an aggressive newsman in the lobby of London's Ritz Hotel, Oilman Jean Paul Getty (TIME cover, Feb. 24, 1958) was persuaded to offer some reasons why the life of a billionaire is not roses all the way. "Quite a bother," to Getty, 66, and an altar-scarred veteran of five marriages, is a continual stream of letters from ladies proposing to be his sixth missus. Among his other complaints: "People keep writing me for money. They don't realize I don't have any spare cash."

At the Eastern National Livestock Show in Timonium, Md., virtually all honors in the Devon bull competition were swept by a Western cattleman. His bulls took blue ribbons for Grand Champion bull, Best Pair of bulls and Best Bull Calf. Owner: Oregon's Democratic Senator Wayne Morse.

The old man had come to Brussels to accept a $2,000 award for his good works in Africa. In recent years it has become a pyramiding proposition: the more good works Medical Missionary Albert Schweitzer performs, the more money he gets to carry them forward faster. When he was greeted by an official party at the Prevoyance Sociale Building, Dr. Schweitzer exchanged pleasantries, then made his choice between an escalator and a flight of stairs to the fourth-floor scene of his new honor. Bemusing most of his greeters, Nobelman Schweitzer flew up the stairs, left those who had deferred to his age by taking the escalator to ponder the virtues of fast footwork at 84.

Painting Manhattan a mild pink, with five other Soviet musicians, Russia's famed Composer Dmitry Shostakovich mustered a rare smile when meeting U.S.

Composer Morton (Fall River Legend) Gould at an ASCAP dinner in the visitors' honor. At week's end, Shostakovich and his countrymen rolled into Manhattan's cavernous Basin Street East to catch some summit-level jazz presided over by Old Maestros Benny Goodman on clarinet and Red Norvo on vibraharp. But if the Russians really dug the decadent, blood-tingling music, they showed it only with polite applause, an occasional twitch, no joyous faces.

Taking her first notice in her "My Day" column of Congressman-Son James's recent book, Affectionately, F.D.R., Eleanor Roosevelt took Jimmy gently to task for rapping onetime White House Housekeeper Henrietta Nesbitt. "Whatever Mrs. Nesbitt did," wrote Mrs. Roosevelt, "she did under my direction. I remember feeding everyone for a time on the same menus that had been worked out for people on relief in the days of the Depression . . . And I remember well the day when the author of this book, my son James, said to me pathetically at lunch: 'If I paid five cents extra, Mother, could I have a glass of milk?' And there was the time [the late aviatrix] Amelia Earhart, who was staying with us on a brief visit, said she was hungry and could get nothing to eat in the late evening. This was because she did not know how to go about it. And my son John found the icebox locked at night and was outraged. I think I know good food if I stop to think about it, but too often I do not stop to think about it, so I know I'm no great help to a housekeeper."

In Detroit, where he pleaded guilty in 1951 to a rap of immorally propositioning a plainclothes cop, teary-voiced Singer Johnnie Ray, 32, was nabbed again on the same old charge.

Former Democratic Vice President John Nance Garner, who once hoped aloud that he would live to be 92 (so that he could claim as many years as a private citizen as in public life), turned 91. But that was too close to 92, so he has now raised his goal to an even century mark. To the usual wearisome questions about his longevity, "Cactus Jack" Garner gave an unlikely answer: it seemed to have something to do with his daily custom of eating grapefruit. But some citizens of his home town, Uvalde, Texas, suspect that Garner did not really give up his cigars and whisky last year, as he had dourly announced. No cigars, maybe, but it was quite difficult to picture durable Bourbonman Garner not hoisting one small nip to "strike a blow for liberty" once in a while.

Increasingly seen as a front woman for Britain's royal family, pretty Princess Alexandra, 22, first cousin of Queen Elizabeth, who went out barefooted and in slacks in Australia last summer (TIME, Sept. 14) was far more formal last week when she attended a Brazilian Chamber of Commerce banquet in London.

Indiana's Republican Senator Homer Capehart junketed into the Dominican Republic, paid "great tribute" to Dictator Rafael Trujillo for his "fight against Communism." Then he told Ciudad Trujillo businessmen about an experience of his as a freshman Senator. Tangling jovially with the late Alben Berkley in a private joust, Capehart twitted the then Democratic Senator from Kentucky: "If it hadn't been for the Ohio River, there wouldn't be any Kentucky. It would all have been Indiana." Confidentially responded future Veep Barkley: "Yes, and if that were true, I would have been the Senator, not you."

The holder of U.S. Patent No. 2,850,023, Idaho's one-term (1944-50) Democratic Senator Glen H. Taylor, was in Manhattan at the headquarters of the business based on his invention--a no-itch, nonskid toupee. As president of Taylor Topper, toupee-topped Taylor, a veteran campaign guitar strummer and vice-presidential candidate of the pink-tinged Progressive Party in 1948, features before-and-after pictures of his own pate in his advertising, is now trying to set up Taylor Topper franchises across the U.S. Last week he allowed: "I'm not doing a land-office business--but it takes time for this sort of thing to sink in.*

*Reminiscent of a verse published by the Lewiston (Idaho) Tribune when Taylor launched his venture two years ago:

But here's a point to ponder well-- With each new wavy Taylor wreath, We wonder if he's going to sell A different product underneath.

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