Hard Falls
Barney Oldfield, oldtime auto racer, had a fight in Hollywood with "Prince" Mike Romanoff (Harry Gerguson), Hollywood restaurateur. Oldfield got a black eye. He said the argument started after Romanoff had tried to crowd him off the road. Romanoff declared that Oldfield had rushed up to him on the street, called him a "phony."
Tommy Dorsey, trombonist, swung on Jon Hall, beautiful, bronzed cinemactor. Hall's doctor said that Hall ended up with a broken nose, cut nostril, stabbed neck, sliced head and face, requiring 50 stitches all told. Bystanders reported that Dorsey was joined in the melee by three other men. Scene: Dorsey's Hollywood apartment. Ostensible cause: Hall embraced Dorsey's wife, Actress Pat Dane.
Charles Bickford, red-haired character actor (height: 6 ft. 1 in.; weight: 185), knocked down two men in a Hollywood restaurant. Reason: they had said, "If that redheaded guy isn't a Jew, he works for Jews . . . Hitler was right."
Harold J. Laski, Britain's brilliant, bucktoothed, left-wing economist, plunged five flights without getting out of bed when a Nazi robomb wrecked his hotel. The bed landed upright. Occupant Laski: unhurt.
Homecomers
Lord Beaverbrook, Britain's dynamic, impish 65-year-old Lord Privy Seal, visited his old Canadian boyhood haunts in the Newcastle district of New Brunswick. Remembered by old neighbors in Newcastle as plain Mr. Aitken, he thanked his good friend, William Corbett, a grocery clerk, for sending to London his favorite recipe for buckwheat flapjacks, called on an aged recluse who writes him a weekly Newcastle newsletter, went salmon fishing.
Irving Berlin, back from a four-month tour of Italy with This Is The Army, reported that some 300,000 troops had seen the show, said he had composed a new song (There Are No Wings On A Foxhole*). He added that General George Catlett Marshall was "very pleased" with this infantry ditty. Excerpts:
There are no wings on a foxhole.
If it's where you happen to be
While the shells are flying,
It's doing or dying
For the men of the infantry.
There are no wheels on your tootsies
When you march from night till the dawn.
Twenty miles of hiking
Is not to your liking
But the foot soldier marches on . . .
Copyright 1944 by Irving Berlin, No. 1 Gracie Square, New York City.