People, Nov. 1, 1954

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

Breaking attendance records at a Times Square nightclub in an act that features nine musclemen in loincloths, Mae West, 61, pronounced herself in "puffect" health: "I keep myself in puffect shape. I get lots of exercise—in my own way—and I walk every day . . . Knolls, you know, small knolls, they're very good for walking. Build up your muscles, going up and down the knolls . . . [My] teeth are so puffect that everybody thinks they're false. Do you know why they're puffect? 'Cause I take care of them. I brush 'em all the time. Sometimes I can hardly wait to get to the bathroom and start brushing my teeth."

Crooner Eddie Fisher, 25, discovered that he had a distinguished fan. In Manhattan last week, President Eisenhower heard Eddie sing at the Hotel Sheraton Astor, then delayed his own television speech and asked Fisher to do another verse of Irving Berlin's Count Your Blessings for the TV audience.

Massachusetts' Democratic Junior Senator John F. Kennedy was "very comfortable" in Manhattan's Hospital for Special Surgery after a successful operation on his spine, injured when his PT boat was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer during World War II.

In his fan mail last spring, TV Star Liberace received an unusual letter. "Even back in our old days in Boston ten years ago," it read, "I was sure that you would some day become famous enough for me to kick around in Li'l Abner . . . Since you are now a household word, it is up to all the Yokums and all the Capps to kid the daylights out of you, your piano, your candles, your curly hair and your adoring fans. I plan to do a Sunday page sequence about a pianist named Liverachy. Any resemblance to you will be deliberate . . . Cordially, Al Capp." Cartoonist Capp, whose king-sized ego permits few turndowns, was stunned when Liberace's lawyers said no. Recovering quickly, Capp invented a new character, Loverboynik by name, who bears an astonishing similarity to Liverachy. Loverboynik is a mad, foppish, candle-less TV pianist with a squealing female public and a mass of platinum blond hair. Capp insists that "Loverboynik is not Liberace because he can play the piano quite well and he doesn't giggle hysterically." Modestly, the cartoonist adds: "I don't think he's as funny as Liberace."

The late French Artist André Derain used so much violent color in his paintings that a critic once remarked of them that "someone has thrown a pot of paint into the public's face." It has now been revealed that after he was fatally injured in an auto accident last summer, Derain woke up in a white-walled hospital room, attended by doctors in white, and murmured: "Some red, show me some red, before dying I want to see some red and some green."