Salon Keepers
Back to Manhattan from her first postwar inspection of her villa in Capri came best-dressed Mrs. Harrison Williams, in what the tabloid Daily Mirror called "a pale beige wool dress, with a deeper-than-usual neckline and longer-than-usual skirt." How had she found things? Said she: "A great many things are gone, including a most wonderful wine cellar. Not a bottle remains." But she kept her chin up. "C'est la guerre," said Mrs. Williams.
Ready for the Republican renaissance was a Washington hostess who had been there all along: Alice Roosevelt Longworth. The onetime "Princess Alice," who came out at the White House, was married to Speaker Nicholas Longworth, and dominated capital society when it was mostly Republican, lived alone now at 62 in her mansion that "smells of 1910." But she had been no recluse. Her "gatherings" had continued; only the publicity had failed. So her plans, said she, were simply "to continue with business as usual, pleasure as usual—whatever you want to call it."
It looked now as if Raymond Duncan, brother of the late Isadora and undisputed leader of the homespun Attic cult in Paris, would be busy with salons on two continents. In Manhattan for his first visit in 15 years, Raymond was charmed with the place, planned to shuttle back & forth between Paris and Manhattan hereafter. "New York," said 72-year-old Raymond, his feet in sandals, his pageboy bob in a silvery fillet, "is like an old California mining town. ..." While he was at it he discussed miners. "The miners have a gun . . . and the public has to give up! ... Unions are fascist." He suggested living without coal.
Muscles
In Beverly Hills, Alfred Letourner, onetime French cycling champ, got a $200 fine for taking a nick out of a lady friend's hip. He had not meant to cut the lady (he said). Upset because of her friendship with another, he had just taken a few distraught slashes at her bed, and she happened to be in it. Day after he was fined Letourner was arrested again, charged with creating a disturbance at Barney's Beanery, where his old friend worked. She had married the other fellow. That time, Letourner (said his lawyer) was just trying to patch things up.
In Los Angeles, the Brooklyn Dodgers' Manager Leo ("Lippy") Durocher, fresh from signing a new contract (and telling the world that the Yankees' Larry MacPhail had tried to hire him away from the Dodgers, which MacPhail denied), got a friendly welcome at the airport from Cinemactress Laraine Day, who i) bussed him fondly, 2) announced to the panting press that they were just friends. Promptly another old friend, Powers Model Edna Ryan, now a little confused, rose and pinned a label on him: the Artful Dodger.
Past Masters