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All in the Family

The audience one night last week at the Berkshire Festival had a special treat: Eleanor Roosevelt made her musical debut as the narrator in Prokofiev’s symphonic fable, Peter and the Wolf. The First Lady emeritus, who had arrived to rehearse only that morning, read her score (solo passages underlined in black ink, lines with orchestral accompaniment in red) with a mellow distinctness, never missed a cue. The audience called her back for five rousing curtain calls. Said Conductor Serge Koussevitzky ecstatically: “Now the First Lady of the world is not only a grandmother to her own grandchildren, but, through her participation in Peter and the Wolf, a grandmother to the children of the world.”

Her own first and only great-grandchild was already taking his appointed place in the family circle. Nicholas Delano (“Little Bear”) Seagraves—his mother, Anna Eleanor Dall Boettiger (“Sistie”) Seagraves, is the eldest child of the Roosevelts’ eldest child, Anna—hit his first-year mark, obliged the birdie with what might well become another famous grin (see cut).

In Washington to check up on his status in the Marine Reserve (he was told that the leathernecks didn’t need any Reserve colonels just yet), Jimmy Roosevelt, a leader of 1948’s “Draft Eisenhower for President” campaign, popped in to see Harry Truman, who told him to “keep pitching” in his campaign for the governorship of California. Jimmy suggested that old Legionnaire Truman might like to come out for the American Legion Convention in Los Angeles this October. “I hope to see the President in California before the election,” said Candidate Roosevelt, “and I know the President wants to attend.”

All in Good Time

Conferred on General Mark Clarlc, Chief of Army Field Forces, by Brazil’s President Eurico Gaspar Dutra: the honorary rank of general in the Brazilian army. Invited to dedicate a new industrial exhibit hall named in his honor in Berlin: General George Marshall, wartime U.S. Army Chief of Staff. Greeted in Berlin by hordes of Germans who pelted him with flowers: Philadelphia Adman Frank Howley, onetime Commandant of the city’s U.S. sector.

Anita Garibaldi, 60, granddaughter of General Giuseppe Garibaldi, and a namesake of the great liberator’s Brazilian wife, enrolled at Naples’ Oriental Institute to get a degree qualifying her to teach English in Rome’s high schools.

In Peoria, rebellious Republicans upset a party convention slate by nominating Red (“The Galloping Ghost”) Grange (Illinois, ex-’25) for trustee of the University of Illinois.

From her $61-a-day suite in San Francisco’s plush-and-gilt Fairmont Hotel, Egypt’s Queen Mother Nazli, newly dispossessed by son King Farouk because she approved her daughter’s marriage to a non-Moslem, thought it over, announced: “Maybe I should get a job.”

Shouts & Tremors

Pennsylvania’s Governor James Duff had had enough of home-grown Communists: “Instead of putting these guys in jail for five years, they ought to be hanged.”

On the other hand, Dr. Emil Fuchs, Leipzig professor of religion and father of British Atom Bomb Spy Klaus Fuchs, got off a telegram to the U.N. explaining that everything would be hunky dory if the West would just stop disagreeing with Russia.

Al Jolson, 62, indefatigable entertainer of troops in World War II, asked the Government to send him to Korea, scoffed at the prospective discomforts: “I been to Guam. You got to sleep high on Guam or the rats will bite you. But hell, I’m used to that around here.”

Still battling the British Colonial Office, which has ordered them to leave Bechuanaland, Chief Seretse Khama and his white queen Ruth had had enough of power politics. Said Ruth: “I would prefer not to live in any British territory. They have brought unhappiness to us and kept Seretse and I [sic] apart for most of our married life.”

For her part, Cinemactress Jane Russell was only too happy to provide a few pinups for the boys over there: “If the boys want ’em, we’ll shoot ’em and send ’em, bless ’em.”

Arts & Letters

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, peripatetic Playwright Tennessee Williams explained that “the American artist travels [because] America is no longer a terribly romantic part of the world, and writers, all except, possibly, Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, are essentially romantic spirits.”

In a chatty letter to Columnist Leonard Lyons, Ernest (“Papa”) Hemingway, 51, admitted that events in Korea had not given him itchy feet: “Have no intention of mixing in this one, unless it spreads to Europe where I speak the language and could be some good . . . War gets to be a pain in the [deletion] when you have been going to them since you were 18 . . .”

Cinemactress Arline Judge, 38, past mistress at the art of marriage & divorce, who once said that she was sorry she didn’t start out with Sixth Husband George Ross Jr., told a Virgin Islands divorce court that she could hardly wait to see the last of him.

On the second anniversary of her third-story leap to freedom, onetime Soviet Schoolteacher Oksana Kasenkina announced that she was writing a novel, to be called The Red Devil. “Of course, the Red Devil is Stalin. Who else?”

For Little, Brown & Co., fussy little Novelist Evelyn Waugh graciously supplied a blurb for his upcoming historical novel, Helena, due in October: “Technically this is the most ambitious work of a writer who is devoted to the niceties of his trade . . .”

Hail & Farewell

U.N. Secretary General Trygve Lie air-hopped from Lake Success to Oslo and back on an “Atlantic weekend trip.” Mrs. Lie, planning to stay over for a five-week visit, took along three 10¢bags of popcorn for her three-year-old grandson, who, she said, “just loves it.”

Expertly guided by his ex-leading lady (in Rocky Mountain) and latest bride-to-be, Patrice Wymore, Errol Flynn made his way to Salina, Kans. for an interview with his parents-to-be. “I’m surprised to find Kansas so green,” he remarked. “I always thought it was all dust.” Wearing his usual outsized sunglasses, and occasionally whistling “I’m as corny as Kansas in August,” Flynn accompanied Oilman Wymore out to view the latter’s most recent gusher, decided that he would like his in-laws just fine. Then the happy couple flew to Manhattan. Flynn bade a fond farewell to Patrice and shoved off to make a movie in Paris, where his prospective leading lady will be his next-to-latest fiancee, Rumanian Princess Irene Ghica.

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