Men at Work
Father Divine bounded back into the limelight with a transcendental bang. "I have harnessed it!" cried he in Philadelphia, after a long, dry spell of unpublicized flock-tending. "I say, I have harnessed it! I am the author and the finisher of the atomic energy. I am bringing all of the atomic energy into subjection and by it I am bringing out many inventions! That is what I am doing on earth in heaven today!"
Byron Nelson, king of professional golfers, idle-hour Texas farmer, packed ten dozen eggs into his car, set out with Wife Louise for a stay in Fort Worth and a crack at its Open Golf Tournament. Nelson failed to keep his eye on the ball, skidded on a wet highway, turned turtle. Husband & wife climbed out, uninjured, thoroughly egg-nogged. Tournament winner: Nelson.
Fiorello LaGuardia, New York's outgoing Mayor, Liberty magazine's incoming radio commentator, had in hand 1) a shiny new Packard sedan, free, from the U.S. Conference of Mayors; 2) two more jobs. Beginning Jan. 6 he will do a local broadcast for a dairy firm, and write a weekly Sunday column for the leftist Manhattan tabloid PM, which took a proud half-page to announce the news.
Style & Beauty
Paul Varies ("Adonis of the Wabash") McNutt, usually grey-suited (to blend with his platinum-grey hair), conformed to fashion in Manila, draped his shape in khaki, but added a McNutt touch: on the collar of the High Commissioner to the Philippines glowed golden ornaments—decorative versions of his seal of office.*
Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, made hot fashion news again. Paris flashed word to the New York Herald Tribune that Her Grace had bought two Schiaparelli numbers: a green taffeta formal gown with a full skirt, and a tailored black moire, with "the low-cut neck line forming draped sleeves."
Senator Kenneth S. Wherry, of Nebraska, in the heat of a Manhattan debate with OPA Director Chester Bowles, practically modeled a peach slip. To make his point, the 53-year-old ex-merchant and embalmer snatched some illustrative ladies' wear from a suit box, glared from behind it as he snorted, "Why, you can't tell the front from the back," cried: "That's the kind of sacks Chester Bowles is hanging on the women of America!"
Younger Generation
Eugene O'Neill Jr., assistant professor of Greek at Yale, unpublicized son of the playwright, half brother of much-publicized Oona (Mrs. Charles Chaplin), grandson of the late Actor James O'Neill, had a fling at theatrics himself. His role, in a one-night stand in Manhattan: narrator at a costumeless, setless reading of Oedipus Rex, which he characterized in a New York Times article as "so human that it makes you shudder ... so tense that it stretches your soul. . . ."†
WAC Sergeant Muriel McCormick Hubbard, 43, wealthy granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Harvester King Cyrus McCormick, spent a night in jail in Marysville, Calif., paid a $100 fine for drunken driving. Two cops had found her asleep in her Packard, wakened her, let her go, then watched her drive into a palm tree. Said Army officers at Camp Beale of Sergeant Hubbard: she's "doing a wonderful job" in personnel work.