Prompted by the news from France
I wish
they'd
NANCY SPAIN stick
challenges the celebrities
WHAT & dangerous
thing is celebrity. No sooner make a name for yourself than it can become a platform from which the wildest of as- sertions can seem pro- . found.
for a litle success.
Paderewski, the great pianist, was also a force in the Constitu- tion of the new Poland in 1919,
THE CHINA MAIL, MONDAY, JULY 11, 1960.
to the
things they
know about!
Belter by far to continue to d
peared, wearing pink cotton shirt. The frivality, the gossip. the things that celebrated the trousers and a boy's grey pull the pouring of Scotch that one name in the first place and hope over with a V-neck. I was shock- associates with Sagan began. We ed by her appearance. She ate lunch. Afterwards we played looked frail, sad, and premature- bowls. And suddenly we were ly old. She constantly scratched interrupted by Sagan's father the inside of her right forearm and mother who drove up with a and said she couldn't say why I dachshund that had been para- was so startled by her bit in the fysed in a motor accident. It painters paper.
wurmed it way around the and novelists should carry right "But it is as though Nancy lawn, using its from legs like a on with entertaining the public Mitford had written a leading real. Everyone insisted it was and leave politics to the profes- article attacking Macmillan's perfectly happy. sionais..
"Come and see the horse foreign policy, I explained "You
Francoise had for a birthday must go that,"
The name present." someone said.
But he is the only exception can find to the golden rule that actresses, musicians,
Why?
She giggled
"Poor
at
broken
"Nancy Milford," but shrugged darling, he has urticaria on his The most recent and most her shoulders gloomily over the back so we can't ride him
present." glaring example of this abuse of rest of my speech. popular appeal hit me a great
"You mus! accept responsi-
The stallion, a beautiful chesi blow between my glaring eyeball bility for the things you write, nut thoroughbred had recently when Francunse Sega. People all over. France as well out of his field, apparently driven that notoriously naughty young as in the places where your mad by the nipping of the es novelist, plunged into the poutí article was reprinted are think in the thundery weather. Alter cal headlines with some abuse of ing of you as Joan of Arc. They I had caught him I groomed General de Gaulle and the vi- expect another move from you him. I enjoy grooming horses leged Algerian atrocities.
and I must say this horse needed it badly-bul I was disappointed. After all, I hadn't driven 400 miles to groom a horse.
I could hardly avoid her pitem for it was reprinted all over the world. Sagan ..that gloomy. shy, irresponsible child, with her fast cars, late love of whisky. hours: her broken marriage, pre occupation with love and speed why had she written a fighting political piece? I couldn't be lieve it.
So I rang her up at her newly bought manor house in Nor- to didn't seem mandy. She think the had done anything strange. "Come to lunch." she said. "We can discuss it then."
Frail, sad
•
So I drove off in Équemauville, a one-sirceted, one-eyed vill age near Honfleur. The whole thing was a bil of un adventure. I had only a tele- phone number by which to trace the house.
It stood back-a large. vacant-looking shell of a place, with the shutters light closed. B was deep in an avenue of gloomy trees.
Mr. Frank
round
We sat silently in the rain until we were joined by a pleasant, big-nosed, shouldered, dark young man called Mister Frank. I had pre- viously been aware of him as the life force of the house, answering the telephone in a flapping silk dressing-gown, shouting to Fran- coise through her bedroom door Now I became aware of him as a blinding intellectual and political force. He is a journalist, I be- lieve, and has also written a couple of novels.
More time
|
AFTER THAT BLISTERING BLAST FROM TRUMAN
Can
Kennedy
still pull it off?
IF I MUST FORECAST
THEN I'LL SAY:
He'll
be nominated, but
what a fight it's
going to be
New York
JUST when millionaire Senator Jack Kennedy
was running way out in front as Presidential candidate for the Democrats he is tripped up savagely by ex-President Harry Truman.
And Mr Truman, after tripping up the Golden Boy of American politics, tells the world that the Democratic convention which opens today is "rigged and fixed" and implies that the Kennedy forces have used every sort of pressure to get their boy nominated.
on
not fallen flat Kennedy was shaken but had his face. He was still running, but not as swiftly, and the moneybags of his father, ex-Ambassador to England Joseph Kennedy, are weighing him down.
porters.
Paul
almost venomous.
was harsh,
Segon's great name, hey repu- tation is such delicate thing. A reputation because of our many
Kennedy was resting at Cape be taken to the courts, but will means of mass communication in Cod the other afternoon, think- be the subject of bitter debate. the twentieth century, can nowing about the Press conference
Mr Truman's explosive Prcs: be made overnight by a lucky he had called, demanding time word, a chance comment. Sagan's on television and radio, to an- conference was a late-hour all- reputation at present is based on swer
out effort to halt Jack Kennedy Mr Truman's charges, lite more than her personality, which come only just short of and throw the convention wide her talent, and her associates alleging bribery against some of open. gentis for publicising them both. the Kennedy' backers and sup- The ex-President
national Butler, the chairman of the Democratie When Harriet Beecher Stowe Party, is the ostensible target of wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin" she ex-President Truman's
but the man Mr Truman is after the American Civil War. No- is the intensely ambitious Joe body can surely pretend that this Kennedy, who rose from rags to was a good thing. But at least riches estimated at £70,000,000, Mrs Stowe knew what she felt Butler exposed the charge and signed her name to things in even before it was made by which she actively believed.
If Sagan felt so strongly about Algiers she should surely
have! given a little more time to the
Anyway, with lucid force, sound argument and all the passion I had expected from the is supposed to have precipitated Entant Terrible of Literature, he defended her article. He also defended the artist's right to say what be damned well pleased without getting emotionally or politically involved in it.
Triman.
DEBATE
In a slip which a reporter sug- gested was Freudian, he called Jack Kennedy "Senator Joseph attack, Kemedy."
He was talking about the son, but thinking about the father.
So are a lot of other people since this campaign began.
The Kennedy campaign has been bankrolled and master- minded from the start by Joseph Kennedy, operating from Palm Beach and avoiding the public platform. and the television studios,
He quoted large hunks of the article itself and Sagan nodded and said: "That's right, that's
He said: The convention is not what I thought. I haven't subject than one afternoon dis- rigged. Reports that I have been changed a bit. Why should they cussing an isolated case with a promised a lucrative legal prac- Hundreds of thousands of dol- Although it was getting on for think of me as Joan of Arc?" lawyer,
|tice in Washington when I retire half past twelve everyone in the I got the impression that I went to Normandy longing from active politics after the house was nbviously Found Mister Frank is quite accustomed to be enlisted for some great election are not true, asleep. Several maids showed to pulling words into agan's cause, longing to be inflamed "No one has been pressured, me into the parlour (I counted mouth. He certainly made a with some form of indignation. There has been no fixing or rig- three maids anyway), sparsely good job of h that lunch time. left deeply disillusioned
and ging" furnished with a record player. At this point the place became feeling that the depths of power The allegation against Butler some wickerwork chairs and alive with young people. two are certainly not for, irrespon- are so grave that, in England, a Bome paper-backed books.
more girls. also in coloured sible clowns or children.
slander and libel action would About an hour later Sagan op- trousers. A man in i pink
ensue. Here the matter will not
THE LABOU
---(London Express Service).
Magnificent
"De Countficent!"
*** Ike
Mac! "Ike
NATO
“Remember those disturbing days when Khruscher smiled
all at sizes and
Cummings
us, and we ware
lars have been flung. into the battle to get 43-year-old Jack Kennedy the nomination. There have been money pressures and political pressures. Everyone knows that,
Young Kennedy has won seven primary elections in a row and before Tru man's onslaught had amassed a huge majority of delegates convention votes, only 117 short of the 741 needed for the nomination.
It looked like a walk- over,
SUEZ
Emmwony
by DON
by
ANTHONY
EDEN
a cinch, a clean sweep, smoothness in the Senate as was
Now I am not so sure,
IDDON
still his friend majority leader, he could be Stuart Symington.
Senator
Kennedy has been hurt hadly, mired in the flux and stress of In my opinion Mr Symington,
but not wounded mortally. He the did not look worried recently as Angeles. He he posed for pictures, grinned chance but no more. and said: "Politics is a funny business."
DADDY
the
But his brother Bob, his chief- of-staff in Los Angeles and per- haps the most ruthless of Kennedy clan, was working frantically to repair the damage. The man who has been helped most by the Truman charge of rigging and fixing is the tall Texan Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, the most powerful man in Congress.
Johnson is 51, and although he had a heart attack in 1955 he works & 18-hour day, has created a powerful political machine, has. a staff with a payroll of almost half a million dollars a year, and can dispense or withhold politi- cal patronage as he wishes.
Johnson, who sometimes wears high-heeled cowboy boots and a wide-brimmed Stetson and has the initials LBJ on everything he and his family wear, is an operator of guile and sagacliy behind the flamboyance.
Johnson has cunning, looks, stature, personality, and much greater experience than Ken- nedy, but he is a Southeme and has started late in the race.
Only a few weeks ago he said: "I am determined to put the bug of Presidential ambitions out of my head My granddaddy and daddy before me were legislators. I like the legislative branch. 1 don't know that I would be happy in the executive end of? things. I have neither the train- ing now the temperament for it
But now the song from deep in the heart of Texan was different "We will show them in Los Angeles that we can rub the country the way we run a con- vention."
This is Johmson
LIKE
IKE
the nine men whom Mr Truman named as his candidates after Symington,
He has a personal antipathy to Stevenson, as he demonstrated at the last convention and falled miserably.
And he thinks Kennedy is too young and has been pushed toa hard, too fast, by the forces of the rig and the fix.
Los a distinguished silver-haired Truman today is an angry man sports stadium in
has a fighting patrician from Truman's home shouting his last hurah, and State, Missouri, has little chance, bringing down the Presidency to Truman praised him profusely, if any. Kemedy and Adai the level of precinct politics. but insisted his own candidate Stevenson were not included in
The other day, as the debate raged over his charges, the issue of Kennedy's Roman Catholicism was played pianissimo.
*ED DHUR
"The other way
Tura AROUND!"
WAS my doctor.
was until I got fed ny
(bout the Sither: 8608 I owe him.”
Yet the religious issue cannot be doused. No Catholic has ever, been elected President "of the United Statesyet one of the key man in this extraordi- nary brawl is Pennsylvania's bustling Governor. David Law- zence.
Lawrence, a Catholic' himself, fears that his fellow Catholic Kennedy could not win if nominated.
...
If Governor Lawrence, despite Truman's indictment of. Ken- nedy, decides to support the joue Senator, then Kennedy là in and on his way to the White House.
TICKET
I am asked to make a fearless forecast, but I can only male a fearful one. Kennedy to win at Los Angeles, but only after a bloody and bitter fight,
If the fight goes on 100 long- 1 could be the coy Adlai Steven- son to get the nomination for the third time or the Texan Jobne son or one of a list of horses so dark they se jet black,
The strongest ticket for the Democrats would be Stevenson as Presidential candidate with Kennedy his running matë as Vice-Presidential candidate. would like to see that
It would defeat the Republican candidate, who is almost certain tožbe. Vict. Roesident MUTIONNÉ. Nixo
Kennedy rather arrogantly says: "1 am not interened in the Vice-Presidenc