Talking of Shop

Novelist Somerset Maugham, visiting friends in San Francisco to celebrate his 75th birthday, had something pleasant to remember. "The nicest compliment ever paid me," he announced, "was a letter from a G.I. in the Pacific during the war, who wrote me that he had read an entire story of mine without having to look up a single word in the dictionary."

Vice President Alben Berkley made a realistic admission, a luxury that an ex-Senator can afford. Caught between trains in Indianapolis, he explained: "I'm on my way to punish an audience with a speech." Meanwhile, in Washington, grandchildren Alben II, 4, and Dorothy Anne, 6, took advantage of grandpa's absence to check over his old Senate desk, and made a few marginal notes on his copy of the Congressional Record.

To a producer who had asked him for a play, William Saroyan scribbled his thanks and regrets on a postcard: "I do not believe any producer can afford to produce one of my plays. They are all potential failures, and my terms are unfair. Jim Dandy has been published (and unproduced) a long time. A great play; a surefire money-loser."

Capitalism, concluded Nelson Rockefeller, has finally grown up to its responsibilities and "is now concerned with production and distribution that will benefit all peoples." In the future, he hoped, "capitalistic investment [must be] based not so much on the profit motive as on an opportunity to do the most good."

Veteran Adman Bruce Barton had figured out a sure-shot means of cracking the Iron Curtain: bombard Russia with Sears Roebuck catalogues. "If that day ever comes," he told a San Francisco salesmen's convention, "we will not need any longer to fear Communism. No ordinary Russian ever suspected such a wealth of wonderful and desirable objects exists anywhere in the world as the Sears catalogue presents."

Britain's Moira Shearer, red-haired prima ballerina of the movie The Red Shoes (TIME, Oct. 25), panned her own film as bad ballet. In a lecture to London's Royal Academy of Dancing, she said that making the picture had been a "mistake," and that furthermore, the display advertising made her look like "Jane Russell in black tights."

Moments to Remember

Elizabeth Firestone, 25, an ambitious young musician who wants some day to write musical comedies, took a big step in the right direction. Over a coast-to-coast radio hookup for The Voice of Firestone--sponsored by the rubber company that her grandfather Harvey founded--she played one of her own piano concertos. The audience thought it sounded fine.

In Cannes, France, Aly Khan called in reporters and handed around typewritten statements announcing his engagement to Rita Hayworth (he is still married to his first wife; Rita's divorce from Orson Welles became final last November). Said he: "I am going to marry Miss Hayworth as soon as I am free to do so." Cinemactress Hayworth, Aly's house guest in various resorts since they met on the Riviera last summer, quietly announced that she was "in full agreement" with his announcement.

Winston Churchill II, 8, at boarding school at Gstaad, Switzerland, took time off from his books for a few hours of sledding. He approached the afternoon's sport with all the glitter-eyed enthusiasm of his grandpa opening a parliamentary debate.

The late great Vincent van Gogh, who was about as eccentric as an artist can get (he once sliced off a piece of his ear and presented it to a reluctant lady), was worthy of a movie, biography, Hollywood decided, but he was too censorable a subject for local handling. Twentieth Century-Fox had the answer: the van Gogh story would be produced in France with a French producer, a French cast, a French script, a U.S.-backed bankroll, and, eventually, English subtitles.

Zone of Quiet

Contralto Marian Anderson revealed that she had had a "serious" throat operation last July. Said she: "A cyst was removed from the food pipe near the base of my lungs--top of the solar plexus, I guess you call it. The operation was very intricate and had to be performed through my back. Tubes were inserted in my throat so I could breathe. This, I understand, was an extremely delicate matter. The least deviation might permanently injure my vocal chords." She had been able to start singing again in August, gave her first post-operative concert in October. Now, fully recovered, she was off on a full-scale transcontinental concert tour: "You can't imagine how happy I am . . ."

In Washington, Representative J. Parnell Thomas, 54, still ailing with intestinal trouble, had a blood transfusion.

In Manhattan, Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., 40, had to go to the hospital when an old football injury to his back started acting up again.

In Manhattan, Lana Turner, 28, expecting her second child in April, lost it through a miscarriage.

The Way Things Are

In San Francisco, Will Durant, 63, popularizer of philosophy and history, took a long, dim view: "The world situation is all fouled up." But then, "It always has been. It always will be. I see no reason for change . . . What we call progress merely increases our ability to do the same good and evil to one another as previous generations have done. The tools have changed . . ." The atom bomb? "The muskets used at Cressy were as destructive in their time."

In London, Bertrand Russell, 76, deplored modern efficiency: "If art is in any important sense to survive it will [be only] by recapturing the capacity for wholehearted joys and sorrows which prudence and foresight have all but destroyed."

Bernard Shaw, 92, was finishing up a new play called Far Fetched Fables--a story about the state of the world after a round of atomic warfare.

Albert Einstein, 69, on his way home after an operation (TIME, Jan. 10) considered the chances for world peace: "Where there is no will there is no way."

Thomas J. ("Think") Watson, 74, president of International Business Machines Corp., checked his private sources, predicted that 1949 would be a good business year: "My review shows me there is no need to worry about the outlook."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.