People: People, Aug. 18, 1941

In a tabloid snob-gossip's dream week, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, 28, the country's best-known young multimillionaire sportsman, was sued for divorce in New York by Manuela Hudson Vanderbilt (charges: adultery with two corespondents). Said Alfred's mother, Mrs. Margaret Emerson, who has been married four times: "I wouldn't give much for him if he didn't. After all, he's a normal young man and he has been separated from his wife for eight months. He wouldn't be a son of mine if he stopped living." Wept crocodile Hearstling Cholly Knickerbock er: "What a pity that we are to be treated to the ugly spectacle of another Vanderbilt divorce in times such as these." No weeper, Mother Margaret talked on & on to reporters about "life" (sex): "If you've stopped loving a person, you have, and that's all there is to it. There's no explanation for it. But, although it happens every day, people always are upset. They can't be realistic. They haven't the courage to admit it, call it off, then go on with their lives." -t — Sixty-nine-year-old Lady Decies, bejeweled grand dame of the international set, announced at starchy Newport (the scene of many of her fabulous social antics 30 years ago) that 74-year-old John Graham Hope De la Poer Beresford, Baron Decies, was suing her for divorce on grounds of desertion. Once she was the wife of chilly Henry Symes Lehr, Society's top fop and unofficial Newport jester, whom she delicately peeled in her book "King Lehr" and the Gilded Age. She wrote that she had never been happy with him; of her present husband, once remarked: "I married Decies so I could attend the coronation." — — To the New York World-Telegram said Novelist John Steinbeck's wife, Carol, currently separated from the author: "I suppose every married couple faces a situation like this. Most women would go to Reno and call it a day. I want to see it through. . . . If we wait perhaps John and I will be all the better and finer for it. ... There won't be the blind devotion, the dumb trust, but there will be a new understanding. . . . This is something all men go through. . . . This isn't a break. . . . I've submerged myself for John Steinbeck. I became part of him. I wrote verse. I put it aside. Nothing mattered but John. . . ." / / Composer Walter Joseph Donaldson, who sang of domestic bliss in My Blue Heaven, sued Dorothy Ann Donaldson for divorce. She countered with a suit for separate maintenance of $175 a week, / / Minsky Stripper Rose La Rose sued for a divorce from J. Harrington Price, retired toy manufacturer. She told New York Sunday News reporters that after a hard day's work she had to put on an extra show at home while Price played his mouth organ. "In the theater I have my audience and am inspired," she said. "There was no inspiration performing for an audience of one. ... I would be crying, but all he would say was: 'Take it off! Take it off!' ': Of Price's harmonica style she declared: "It stifled me." —/ As Colonel Hubert Fauntleroy ("Black Eagle") Julian, Negro flier-of-fortune, waved good-by to his wife Essie in front of her Harlem apartment, a process server thrust into his surprised hand papers notifying him of her suit against him for separation. She asked $30 a week