PEOPLE
Dictator Juan Domingo Perón of Argentina explained why he had committed his country to war on the U.S. side, if war should ever come. “We are in the Antarctic Circle, Russia is in the Arctic Circle, and the U.S. is in the middle,” said he, adding easily,”with the atomic bomb.” He observed: “The stronger always wins.”
Earnest A. Hooton, self-winding Harvard anthropologist, unwound a wallop at love on the dole. “Stupid, shiftless, and improvident human beings breed the most rapidly,” he informed a California lecture audience, “because they feel little responsibility to their offspring and recognize no obligation to society. . . . If we must feed and foster the incompetent, we should at the same time prevent their reproducing their kind.”
Blonde Elaine Stritch, who sings a wiggly “Bongo-bongo-bongo” in Broadway’s Angel in the Wings and who is also a cousin of Chicago’s Samuel Cardinal Stritch, explained to an interviewer why she doesn’t consider the theater her “religion” as some actresses do. “It’s nice to have something lasting about yourself,” said she. “There’s certainly nothing lasting and definite about the theater. But you know the show at St. Pat’s won’t close for a long time. . . . Democracy is lost.”
The Wreathed Brow
Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch, heavy with honors, got another—this time from the students of Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School, who gave him their 15th annual Abraham Lincoln Award for outstanding public service to the City of New York.
For his “world citizenship and his hatred of militarism, dictatorship and violence,” Albert Einstein got the Wendell Willkie One World Award for 1948.
John Harburger and Frederic Hirst—known collectively as John-Frederics, creators of costly millinery trifles—ambiguously declared that Joan Crawford is positively Hollywood’s “sexiest hat wearer.” Maria Montez, they confided, is the “maddest.”
Two other newsworthy hats got together when Eleanor Roosevelt (in a small, fussy one) and Bethune-Cookman College’s Mary McLeod Bethune (in a forthright, big one) put their heads together over tea in Manhattan (see cut). Occasion: a fund-raising drive for a rural school for wayward boys.
Golfer Bing Crosby was elected to buy champagne at the Cypress Point clubhouse on Monterey Peninsula, Calif. On the 16th hole—222 yards, with a 200-yard carry-over across an inlet of the Pacific—he shot a hole-in-one. “We were shooting into the sun,” he explained to the press afterward. “So I just stood up and smacked one blind.”
The Solid Flesh
Princess Alexandra of Kent, youngest (11) bridesmaid at Princess Elizabeth’s wedding, was doing fine after having her appendix out in London.
New York’s Mayor William O’Dwyer, 57, saw spots, felt faint, asked his hospital commissioner for advice. The advice: slow down. A possible alternative: coronary thrombosis. “Is that the thing,” inquired the Mayor, “that blows you over?” He was told that it is. “It’s a good thing to know,” said he, and proceeded to charge around much as usual.
Attorney General Tom Clark was pronounced fine after a physical checkup at a Washington hospital; but doctors who saw his X rays were puzzled. Had he been shot in his youth? The attorney general thought & thought, suddenly found the answer: the night before, he had dined on quail full of buckshot.
The Most Rev. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, 60-year-old Archbishop of Canterbury, was doing splendidly. In London, as high-strung Visitor Danny Kaye rolled away from the Houses of Parliament, the Archbishop walked right in front of Kaye’s auto. Bystanders yelled, Comedian Kaye screamed, the Archbishop jumped. Then he returned to the car, inserted his head, and hummed: “Young man, you very nearly attained a measure of real fame.”
Hearth & Home
Mrs. Alf Heiberg—whose brother is Doris Duke’s ex-husband, James H. R. Cromwell, and whose third husband was Cinemenace Lionel Atwill—updated her feelings about her second husband (General Douglas MacArthur) for the New York Post’s Saloon Editor Earl Wilson. Did she think that the general wanted to be President? “Definitely, yes.” Would she vote for him? “I don’t consider him a possibility. . . . I’ve always been for Taft since I danced with him at the White House Debutantes’ Ball. I came out the same year as his sister, Helen Taft.”*
Little Mickey Rooney, 27, and big second wife Betty Jane Rase (Miss Birmingham of 1944), 21, agreed to their second separation within a year. But this time, said Mickey’s manager, it was a “trial separation.”
Rumania’s ex-King Michael and Princess Anne of Bourbon-Parma were among the unseparated. Bundled against the cold at St. Moritz as they bravely awaited May and marriage, they made an unseasonably dewy picture for February (see cut).
In Los Angeles, a 32-year-old former bit player named Gloria Whitney named lumbering Cinemactor Wallace Berry as the father of her week-old son, sued him for “reasonable monthly support, all medical expenses, and reasonable attorney’s fees.” Said Beery’s attorney: “Mr. Beery denies every allegation. . . .” Said 63-year-old Beery: “I am flattered.”
Plus & Minus
Left by the late financier, Thomas W. Lamont: to Harvard, $5,000,000; to Phillips Exeter Academy, $2,000,000; to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, $1,000,000. The bequests were the three largest in a will that distributed nearly $10,000,000 of an estate whose value has not yet been estimated.
Demanded of Muriel McCormick Hubbard, 46, whose grandfathers were John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Cyrus McCormick: $100,000 damages. Muriel was sued by a Chicago newsboy who charged that the heiress, “in an intoxicated condition” in a restaurant, threw a glass of water into his face.
Demanded by Cinemactress Joan Fontaine: $200,000 damages, from Producers Robert & Raymond Hakim and Great Classics, Inc. She charged that they had agreed to co-star her in a picture with Robert Taylor, and then never did.
* Mrs. Frederick Johnson Manning, 56, of Bryn Mawr, Pa.
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