People

• Share

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

After grappling with two ghostwriters on the issue of how memorable her memoirs should be (TIME, Oct. 17), the Duchess of Windsor joined the dwindling list of do-it-yourself autobiographers, sailed for Paris to take pen in hand, "starting from scratch," in tracing her own rise from Baltimore. Her new title for the yarn, slated to begin serialization in McCall's magazine next March: The Heart Has Its Reasons.

The county fathers of Los Angeles tardily (by three weeks) honored a famed local citizen's 70th birthday, handed a plaque to prodigious Popularizer Will (The Story of Philosophy) Durant, hailed in bronze as "the best known of all the living interpreters of great periods and personalities in history." Shucking off such acclaim, Dr. Durant expertly served up interpretations of two personalities: "I'd say the greatest living philosopher is Bertrand Russell, the greatest historian is Arnold Toynbee." Asked about the mixed blessing of a long life, he philosophized: "I envy Marlene Dietrich [50] because apparently she has been able to defy age. On the other hand, I have more fun writing than looking at Miss Dietrich. To live forever would be about the greatest curse imaginable!"

With half an hour to go one evening during her vigorous portrayal of Joan of Arc in The Lark, Broadway's Actress Julie Harris (TIME, Nov. 28) threw herself into an all-too-real fall onstage, split her lip in sideswiping a footstool. The curtain was rung down for ten minutes, while three doctors recruited from the audience made temporary repairs on Julie. Then, amidst bravos, she finished the play. After that, Julie had eight stitches made in her lip, was almost as good as new at next day's matinee.

Bound for Stuttgart airport on a fog-shrouded Autobahn, a bus carrying Germany's Pianist Walter Gieseking, 60, crashed into a bridge abutment at 70 m.p.h., brought death to two of its 18 passengers. One of the dead: Gieseking's wife Anna Maria, 66. Famed Musician Gieseking, removed from Allied blacklists in 1946 after his eleven years as an unreluctant performer under Hitler, sustained "serious" head injuries but no hurt to the hands that have made him famous.