Walter Winchell, whose cry of "Thief!" at best-selling Anecdotard Ben nett Cerf (Try and Stop Me) has become a familiar theme in his column, turned out to be pasting up a jokebook of his own.
Source: old Winchell columns. Would he give credit where credit was due, when the jokes were not his? Publisher Simon & Schuster "thought so, wherever possible."
Leonard Lyons, who echoes Winchell in trying to raise a hue & cry against Cerf, was also at it himself. His own book would not give other jokesters credit, said he, because all the anecdotes* would be Lyons originals.
Kathleen Morris, whose California estates at Palo Alto and Saratoga used to crawl with celebrities (Alexander Woollcott, Harpo Marx, Edna Ferber, Irvin Cobb et al.) and nieces & nephews (including William Rose Benet's three by his first wife), sold her Palo Alto place for a reported $100,000. But she kept things fairly even by buying another place —something glassy and modern in San Francisco.
Birds of Passage
Mohandas K. Gandhi's youngest son Devadas flew into New York and bowed himself out of a place to lay his head. On a business trip for the Hindustan Times, Managing Editor Gandhi arrived from London at 2:59 a.m., heard that an extra hotel room was available to him, promptly turned it over to a roomless fellow passenger (female), then discovered that he had no extra room. After a small-hour tour of Manhattan on foot and by cab, he wound up in a barber shop at 8 a.m., at last got a room through a helpful fellow customer.
Paul V. McNutt, breezy High Commissioner to the Philippines, blew into Seattle (by way of Adak) on the wings of diplomatic singsong. "After Manila," he hummed, "this cool climate is wonderful." Then he added: "After Adak, this warm weather is wonderful."
Mary Pickford flew home from a European junket with some inside dope. Hitler, said she, was not dead at all, but hiding out in the mountains. She had it from a Berlin guide. She said United Artists (one-third owner: Miss Pickford) was having trouble casting One Touch of Venus. "You can't imagine Venus . . . speaking with a Southern accent, or a New England accent, or a Brooklyn accent," she explained, ". . . it must be absolutely pure English."
Annette Kellerman, who knocked another generation's hats off when she pioneered the one-piece bathing-suit, was back in the U.S. at 58 after years of residence in Australia. The famed bathing beauty arrived in San Francisco in unnatural silence and promptly dropped out of sight.
The Marquess of Queensberry, grandson of the man who is synonymous with boxing's rules, dropped into Manhattan "to see the fights"—the Woodcock-Mauriello go this week, the Louis-Conn go next month. The fiddle-fit Marquess, looking 30 at 50, came well-heeled: in either jacket pocket of his pin-stripe suit bobbed a bottle of 22-year-old Scotch.