"Names make news." Last week these names made this news:
Mabel Walker Willebrandt hopped out of a night plane at Pittsburgh's airport to ask: "Do you know where the nearest beauty shop is?"
In Christie's auction rooms, London, a set of self-sketches by Charlie Chaplin, once the property of the late Sir William Orpen, was bought for $18 by Sir Alec Martin, Christie's partner.
In one hour at a roulette wheel in the Casino at Juan-les-Pins, France. Novelist E. Phillips Oppenheim won 200,000 francs ($13,180). Said Gambler Oppenheim: "A very amusing pastime."
At Glen Cove, L. I., Mrs. Isabel Dodge Sloane lay ill of pneumonia, from a cold contracted while returning from Chicago where she saw her No. 1 horse Cavalcade win the Arlington Classic.
Frank Jay Gould leased his fire-gutted Palais de la Mediterranee at Nice to the rival Monte Carlo Casino for 1,000,000 francs ($65,900) a year for 30 years, bought a $25,000 estate at Ardsley-on-the-Hudson, N. Y. In 1913 the youngest son of old Jay Gould sailed for France because he said the U. S. Government meddled too much in business. This autumn he will return to the U. S. for the first time in 21 years, live in his new home at Ardsley.
Noel Coward once told Mrs. Ethel Harriman Russell, daughter of Washington's famed Mrs. J. Borden ("Daisy") Harriman: "You're no actress; you're a monologist. Why don't you write a play?" Last week, after a trial period, Mrs. Russell signed a regular contract as scenarist with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, planned to take her two children to Hollywood.
Col. Edward Mandell House passed his 76th birthday at his summer home in Beverly Farms, Mass., "altogether too busy" with "international problems" to celebrate the occasion. To newshawks the mousy little man from Texas said: "President Wilson and I never broke. What made it seem so was the change wrought in Wilson after Paris. After Paris he was a sick man, a man in the hands of a bedroom circle. The bedroom circle kept him apart from me and kept me apart from him. My letters never reached him; no messages were sent to me.
"The situation between myself and Mrs. Wilson remains precisely what it always was. We were never close friends; we are not now. We never have been enemies; we are not now.
"I'm in close touch with affairs in Europe today. I know a good deal about what's going on and I have my own notions . . . but I'm out of the picture and it's not for me to talk."
To Paris correspondents Mrs. Sara Delano Roosevelt, 80-year-old mother of the President, was chatting of her son. Newshawk: "Did you ever have to spank him?'' Mrs. Roosevelt: ''No, I never did. But I did lock him in the closet once, and I thought he would kick the door down, he was so furious.''