(2 of 2)
Luise Rainer packed her things in Manhattan for a return to Hollywood after four years, planned to make it a 15-day trip, cried: "I will jump in every river and eat sausages out of my hand and see the sun come up every morning. Really, that is my ideal of life."
Vets
Vincent Youmans, veteran hit composer (Tea For Two, Hallelujah, Great Day, Without A Song), was back on Broadway, with plans and a backer, nearly ten years after t.b. had put him out of action. His backer: Doris Duke Cromwell (see col. 1). Among his plans: two musicomedies (Good Neighbors and Joe), a cinebiography of Tchaikovsky.
Geraldine Farrar, soprano emeritus, sent OPA General Manager Chester Bowles a few suggestions from Ridgefield, Conn., where she heads a consumer committee of the local rationing board. Her ideas: reduce OPA's printed matter and its "complex reiteration"; reduce the "verbiage to a point of clarity"; have a little faith in the average merchant's honesty and stop prying into his affairs; cut down on exhortations to the consumer; throw out the "paragraph dictators and their Bourbonesque indifference to the attitude of the general public."
Betty Blythe, five-alarm figure of the early silents (The Queen of Sheba), was trying a comeback with a tiny part in a Columbia quickie, Crime Doctor.
Enrico Caruso's widow, Dorothy, who got out of Italy in 1939 and is now living quietly in Manhattan, told an interviewer she doubted that bombings would unite the Italians against the Allies, explained: "Every city is ... like a country itself. ... If Rome is razed to the ground Florentians will say to the Romans, 'If the capital had been in Florence, where it should have been, this would have happened to us, not you.' "
Henry Ford, as he approached 80, gave his formula for success: "Do your own work, mind your own business and don't engage in controversies. . . . And, above all else, keep away from lawyers. They are bound to get you into trouble."
* Critic George Jean Nathan, following his own fetishes, urged that "once a girl strips, she should be revealed not in bare anatomy but in a very sheer thin blue dress with a white lace collar."