All in the Family
Walter Winchell's blonde, 18-year-old actress-daughter Eileen—known to her friends as Walda, known professionally as Toni Eden—pulled a surprise wedding on her usually alert father. The groom: William Lawless, 29, art-student son of a retired Boston motorman. Next day Winchell reported the event with characteristic aplomb: "First man to scoop Walter Winchell in a long time is William Lawless. . . .'' Two days later, father scooped son-in-law by announcing that daughter had decided to annul it.
Colonel James Roosevelt's 29-year-old wife Romelle let it be known that a baby, their first (but his third), was expected next November.
Charles Spencer Chaplin lost a plea in Los Angeles Superior Court for a new trial of the case in which he was judged the father of Joan Berry's 20-month-old daughter, Carol Ann.
Harry S. Truman, father of one, copped the "Father of the Year" title awarded by the National Father's Day Committee, which also chose: General Dwight D. Eisenhower, father of one, as "outstanding father of the war," and made low, respectful bows to Walter Lanier ("Red") Barber, sportscaster, father of one; Fredric March, actor, father of two; Jack Benny, comedian, father of one; and Bing Crosby, father of four.
Harry Bridges, wife, Agnes, filing a cross complaint to his divorce suit, charged that the longshoremen's labor boss, in 1943, had fathered an illegitimate child by a Manhattan nightclub dancer.
Moving Day
Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery gave up caravan-living, bedded himself down in a 75-room, 17thCentury castle near Oldendorf, Germany. (The castle's ex-tenant. Baron von Vincke, got a room over a bar in the village.)
Kirsten Flagstad, ex-Metropolitan Opera star who has been in Norway since 1941, said she now wanted to return to the U.S. With Husband Henry Johansen in jail as a suspected quisling (he built barracks for Germans), Flagstad denied that she herself had ever collaborated, admitted that she had been booed in Stockholm, but "I don't know why."
Ernst ("Putzi'') Hanfstaengl, Harvard graduate and ex-pianist-in-waiting to the ex-Führer, prepared to return to the fatherland after six years in British custody. Home Secretary Sir Donald Somervell announced that Putzi, who last saw Germany in 1937, was not on the Allies' list of war criminals.
Fashion & Beauty
The Duke & Duchess of Windsor dropped in on the Salvation Army in Manhattan—he in a brown and tan get-up with a black derby, she in a grey suit, matching beanie, sable scarf, pearl necklace, diamond clip, aquamarine-&-sapphire earrings. When the Duke shed his topcoat, a nosey bystander noted that it was a hand-me-down from the '30s, with a label inside the collar which read: "Prince of Wales."
Private First Class Clarence W. Ross, stationed at Las Vegas Army Airfield, peeled off his uniform at the National A.A.U. Senior Weight-lifting Championships, displayed his Varga-boy thorax and other features (see cut), which added up to a title: 1945's Most Perfectly Developed Man.
The Literary Life