The Queen Mother wore a diamond tiara shaped exactly like her hats— honestly! . . .
Since this was a wedding reception, Sistie and Buzzie got a taste of champagne. They didn't seem much impressed with the sour stuff. . . .
Sir Samuel Hoare sat in the peanut gallery draped in blue satin, as though forgetfully he had worn his spouse's negligee to the Abbey. . . .
Francis Ormond French, who has been in and out of hot water oftener than a four-minute egg, has again put his haughty family squarely behind the eight ball. . . .
Zippy comments like these on "People Who Matter'' have long been the highly marketable stock-in-trade of smart, nosey Inez Callaway Robb, who for the last ten years has been sticking pins into stuffed shirts as "Nancy Randolph'' of the world's biggest tabloid, Manhattan's daily News. This week blue-eyed Inez Robb, chic and peppy at 36 despite her greying hair, started on a brand new job as "roving reporter," covering U. S. and international high life for the rival New York Mirror and more than 100 other papers lined up by King Features Syndicate. First assignment : to survey the prospects for socialite Manhattan's winter "season." With the new job went a new by-line (her real name) and a whopping jump in pay (from about $175 a week to $420).
Inez Callaway Robb's career has been the kind every pencil-nibbling journalism-school co-ed dreams about. California-born and Idaho-raised, she earned her first silk stockings scribbling high-school notes for the city editor of the Boise Capital News, a next-door neighbor. After a course at University of Missouri's famed School of Journalism, she landed a reporting job on the Tulsa World, pasted everything she wrote into a scrapbook. One day, between trains in Chicago, she dropped into the Tribune office, left the scrapbook. Within a fortnight she had a wire from the News (whose Publisher Joseph Medill Patterson is a cousin of the Tribune's Robert Rutherford McCormick) offering her $75 a week to write Sunday features.
In Manhattan she felt at home as soon as she walked into her first Christmas Eve party and saw her future husband, Adman J. Addison Robb Jr. "He had a little black mustache and shook up the cocktails. He was just my idea of a city slicker." When, after 18 months, Publisher Patterson suddenly promoted her to society editor, she simply carried her notebook and pencil to debutante parties and night clubs, asked friendly photographers to point out important faces.
What she brought to society reporting was not only a gift of phrase, but a lively news sense, and the ability to see the group she records as a current in the general news stream. When Broker Richard Whitney crashed, Reporter Robb's column was devoted to reporting what lunchers at "21" and the Colony had to say about it. Few society reporters take so newsworthy an approach. She spurns the usual drivel of rumor and chitchat.