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Song & Dance
When the "Tree of Hope" (supposed to provide an immediate job for any actor who touched it) was knocked down on a Harlem street corner where it grew, Tap Dancer Bill Robinson joined the frantic crowd that tore it to splinters; trying to save it, he salvaged two chunky hunks. / / Dated to sing this week at a ball at wealthy Mrs. Herbert Shipman's plushy villa in Newport is her new neighbor, Gertrude Niesen, chatelaine of the Oelrichs mansion. / / Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, 24 and twice a father, won his appeal to Washington for draft deferment as a family man. / / When the chorus of Cincinnati Summer Opera Association, claiming $400 for overtime rehearsals, walked out just before the curtain rose, the management hastily invoked arbitration and put the disputed money in escrow. The stakeholder: Gladys Swarthout, who went on as Carmen with the money in her bosom.
Fortunes of War
While a German plane rocked a merchantman with bombs, Britain's only seagoing woman engineer ran the engine room singlehanded, haloed with escaping steam and showered with black fuel oil. So George VI presented the Most. Excellent Order of the British Empire to gaunt, nerveless Victoria Drummond, 42. a British Fascist Oswald Mosley, interned in London's Brixton Prison, began taking German lessons. / / Antanas Smefona, self-exiled President of Lithuania, discovered living with his wife in a log cabin near Benton Harbor, Mich., is still ecstatic over America's good roads and standard of living. / / Private Hank Greenberg shone in close order drill and calisthenics, won a promotion to corporal. / / Soviet Composer Dmitri Shostakovich (Lady Macbeth of Mzensk) went to work in Leningrad as a fire fighter. / / The public library of Southport, England, threw out 90 books by P. G. Wodehouse, termed them "waste paper." / / Wandering Ex-King Carol of Rumania showed signs of settling down: he bought two automobiles, leased for three months a residence in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacan, was reported to have deposited a tidy $7,000,000 in a Mexican bank.
Hollywood
Veteran Shirley Temple, 12, neither blonde nor chubby any more, came out of her 14-month retirement to go to work on the first of four pictures, at a salary of $50,000 a picture. Said she, "A wonderful vacation ... no school or anything—just fun, like it used to be." / / Veteran Slinker Marlene Dietrich accepted a mother role. / / William Saroyan offered the film rights of The Time of Your Life free to any studio that would contribute "every penny of the proceeds" to national defense. / / Canyon-mouthed Martha Raye swerved her car to avoid another, ran off the road and chuted 150 feet down into a canyon, sprained an ankle.