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Actor John Payne announced that he and Actress Gloria DeHaven would try the second trial separation of their 3½-year-old marriage. Lita Grey, second of Charles Chaplin's four wives, said that her third marriage (to Arthur Day Jr.) had proved a bust after nearly ten years. Actress Susan Peters and Producer Richard Quine found that they were through after 4½ years.
In Manhattan: Radio Funnyman Henry Morgan and his statuesque blonde wife Isobel agreed that they were more congenial apart.* After 20 months of marriage, she sued for separation, asked $750 a week temporary alimony. She complained that he had once faked a foreign accent, pounded on the door and yelled: "Poor lady, your husband has been killed in an automobile accident !" He had also ripped off her pearl choker in a restaurant, she said; complained about her cooking and thrown food in her face; suggested that she commit suicide ("It would be very dramatic. It would end all your troubles and a lot of other women would feel awfully sorry for you"). In rebuttal Morgan told the court: "My wife is a member of the Communist Party, and I personally have seen her membership card ... I have come to the reluctant conclusion that she is entirely devoid of a sense of humor."
Employment
Johnny Weissmuller, 43, was through playing Tarzan after 16 years; he couldn't get together with his studio on contract terms. The new Tarzan: Lex Barker, an old Exeter boy who used to be aide to General Mark Clark in Italy. Weissmuller's new meal ticket: impersonating a screen character called "Jungle Jim."
Babe Didrikson Zaharias, all-round woman athlete of athletes, took on a job-without-pay: as "recreational consultant" to Denver's juvenile court she will teach waifs, strays and "bad boys" how to have fun outdoors.
Greta Garbo turned down a chance to be the next Miss Hush in radio's Truth or Consequences guessing game. Her agent sent a message to M.C. Ralph Edwards: "Miss Garbo never heard of you . . . and the one & only time she ever listened to the radio was to hear President Roosevelt announce the war against the Axis."
Legacies
Left, by Richard Tauber, romantic tenor who made a few fortunes singing champagne-&-waltz schmalz in Viennese operettas: $9,962.16, no will.
Left, by Minnie Dupree, curlylocked sweetheart of U.S. theatergoers in the '90s: $23,611— $20,000 of it to one Sherwood Macomber for "his love and loyalty."
Left, by Steelionaire Charles M. Schwab, in the cornerstone of his Manhattan chateau (which a wrecking crew is now leveling): a handful of coins. Folklore had secreted a fortune in the cornerstone.
The Old Gang
In Rio de Janeiro, Charles ("Get Rich Quick") Ponzi, 70, multimillion-dollar swindler of 28 years ago (who has been tutoring languages for a living), lay half-paralyzed in a hospital charity ward. Of the U.S. he said: "I hated to leave. I loved that country."
In Terre Haute, Ind., William Dudley Pelley, ex-Silver Shirts leader serving 15 years for sedition, lost a fight to spring himself on a writ of habeas corpus.
In London, Sir Oswald Mosley led some 300 Fascist followers through six miles of streets in a May Day parade.