People, Apr. 29, 1957

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

In an outburst of whimsy, with gesture to match, veteran Comedian Charlie Chaplin, celebrating his 68th birthday at his Swiss chalet, piped: "When you're 68, you don't want to cut a birthday cake. You want to cut your throat!" Chaplin's devoted wife, Oona O'Neill Chaplin, 31 and soon expecting her sixth child, laughed nervously as Chaplin displayed a frighteningly realistic flash of his old pantomimic genius, faintly tinged with ham.

France's precocious Novelist Franchise (Bonjour Tristesse) Sagan, 21, owner of a Jaguar, a Buick, a Gordini racer and an Aston-Martin, is a madcap hot-rodder who once exulted: "I like to drive 200 kilometers an hour [125 m.p.h.] barefooted!" Last week she was expected to survive after her Aston-Martin, tooling along an unobstructed highway south of Paris on a clear day, left the road and somersaulted in a field.

While undergoing his recent $129,000 ordeal by question, TV Quiz Whiz Charles Van Doren (TIME, Feb. 11) hired comely Geraldine Ann Bernstein, 23, away from London Records, Inc. to be his secretary. At that time, Geraldine, a New York University English major, was earning $4,160 annually v. Van Doren's $4,400 a year as an English instructor at Columbia. Together, they answered thousands of fan letters (mostly handout entreaties) that swamped Van Doren. Along the way, the couple chivalrously rejected a passel of outright marriage proposals. Another proposal—made by Van Doren himself—was accepted. In the Virgin Islands last week, Charles Van Doren, 31, answered one more question. His response ("I do") won him 1) Geraldine, 2) a tax saving of around $20,000, 3) a mother-in-law who cherishes him as "the answer to every mother's prayer." Bridegroom Van Doren then flashed the family code phrase to his joyful parents in Manhattan: "Worried today."*

Worming his way up through a big mound of original biographical information forms turned over to him by the publishers of Who's Who in America, Chicago Bookseller Ralph G. Newman emerged to announce that he had unearthed scads of tidbits on how the Who's Whoers see, or saw, themselves. Some of Biographile Newman's findings in his initial browsing among more than 1,000,000 forms: Dwight Eisenhower is "about the only man" who keeps on shortening rather than lengthening his write-up. Harry S. Truman keeps insisting that the S is a full middle name, thus should not have a period after it. † For Who's Who's 1920-21 edition, Movie Vamp Theda Bara proudly pointed out that her papa had ceased to be a Goodman, was now legally Bernard Bara, to conform with her screen name. During World War I Lady Randolph Churchill (néee Jennie Jerome of Brooklyn) unaccountably failed to list Winston as her son. A correction from Harry Houdini: "I am not a magician, but a mystifier." General Electric Co.'s Wizard Charles Steinmetz described

*The garbled message received by Pulitzer Prizewinning Poet Mark Van Doren's parents when he married Charles's mother, Writer Dorothy Graffe, in 1922. Last week, however, the telegraph company suggested, helpfully, that Charlie might have meant "married."