Prodigious Producer

Sir: On the current cover of TIME magazine [March 25] my name appears, along with the titles of many of the shows I have produced. There is, however, a very strange drawing of some person or other also on the cover, which is very puzzling to me. Could you possibly have substituted, in error, next week's cover picture in place of mine? I consider this figure you have attached to my name monstrous in appearance, bearing no resemblance to my likeness, which appears on the inside in the body of my story—the one in which I am attired in my Ascot suit, the one I wore when I played the lead in My Fair Lady. Therefore, this is to notify you that I am suing you for $1,000,000 for defamation of caricature.

DAVID MERRICK New York City

Sir: The spontaneous and sensitive painting of David Merrick is a delight. SERENE FELDMAN SUSAN TAMMANY Syracuse

Sir: Amid a riot of witty wordage and abundant alliteration, TIME portrayed Merrick not as a promethean, prolific, prodigious producer, or as a brilliant Broadway Brahma, but as (horrors!) the Abominable Showman! Couldn't you have kindly conceded that this charming champion of the theater has brought delight to thousands of theatergoers, given work to throngs of thespians, and made a place in the sun for worthy playwrights? JANE RENTON SMITH Plymouth Meeting, Pa.

Sir: All that attention to Merrick, entrepreneur, and not a mention of Harvey Sabinson and Lee Solters, his trusty publicists. Eighty percent of what comes out of Merrick's public mouth began in their heads. Even Merrick has been heard to say, "They are the greatest publicists in New York." Well he might. Without them he might be just another successful theatrical producer. (F.Y.I.: I do not work for the gentlemen in question.)

CORINE RIEVES

New York City

Brutal Tediousness

Sir: In your good Essay on American patience [March 25] you did not mention one of our (or anybody's!) most extraordinary examples of patient scientific research. After the discoveries of Uranus and Neptune in 1781 and 1846 it was suspected, because of small irregularities in the motions of these distant wanderers, that there was still another, even fainter, planet. Astronomers calculated a probable orbit, and in March 1929 young Clyde Tombaugh took up the search. He examined scores of telescopic photographs, each showing tens of thousands of star images, in pairs under the blink comparator, or dual microscope. It often took three days to scan a single pair. It was exhausting, eye-cracking work—in his own words, "brutal tediousness." And it went on for months. Star by star, he examined 20 million images. Then on Feb. 18, 1930, as he was blinking a pair of photographs in the constellation Gemini, "I suddenly came upon the image of Pluto!" It was the most dramatic astronomic discovery in nearly 100 years, and it was made possible by the patience of an American.

JOHN WHITE

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Cambridge, Mass.

Honest John

Sir: I certainly enjoyed your thoughtful and penetrating Essay on the U.S. Senate [March 18], even if my name is only John.

JOHN G. TOWER U.S. Senate Washington, B.C.