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Boston Red Sox Slugger Ted Williams, yanked out of baseball for 17 months when the Marine Corps sent him off to fly combat missions in Korea in 1952, sounded a wrathful cry over the plight of Johnny Podres. Now a 1-A military draft eligible, Brooklyn's A-1 Pitcher Podres, 23, winner of two of the four victories that gave the Dodgers their first world championship last fall, spent the past three years in the 4-F bracket because of a bad back. Ever mum about his own recall to a second long tour of duty, Marine Williams fumed: "When Podres became a hero, some politicians said, 'Why isn't a big strong kid like that in the Army?' " Who creates such situations? Williams' unminced answer: "Gutless draft boards, gutless politicians and gutless sportswriters." What's more, Ted Williams knew how to change the draft law: "Baseball careers are short, and they are depriving a player of 20% of his career by the draft.
There's no reason why—with no war—ballplayers shouldn't serve their time in the off season."
Prowling the fashionable reaches of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, the New York World-Telegram and Sun's Pulitzer Prize-winning Staffer Frederick Woltman discovered that Le Pavilion, the town's poshest paradise for fat-walleted gourmets (sample price: $5 for a nibble of imported pate), is having landlord troubles. Le Pavilion's landlord: Columbia Pictures, which wants Pavillowner Henri Soule (rhymes with souffle) to cough up more rent than the piddling $16,500-a-year he now pays. The trouble began, went one version, when Columbia's President Harry Cohn drifted into Le Pavilion and was rushed to a low-rated corner table obscured by potted palms. Denying that he was ever so unkind to his landlord, Soule nonetheless allowed that his top table priorities are based on his patrons' seniority. Among his best-seated customers: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Composer Cole Porter, Grandma Marlene Dietrich, Bernard Baruch, J. Edgar Hoover. Where did Landlord Cohn rank in this spectacular array? Said humble Tenant Soule: "He is always welcome. I smiled and joked with him. Why should an important Hollywood person think a little restaurateur wouldn't talk to him?"
After nearly 15 years of marriage (one daughter) and four of separation, beefy Cafe Societyman John Sims ("Shipwreck") Kelly, 45, far past his pro football days and farther still from his native Kentucky town, slapped a divorce suit on his millionheiress wife, Brenda Diana Duff Frazier Kelly, 34, far past her own salad days as America's "No. 1 debutante and glamour girl." Grounds: desertion. Glamour kept haunting Brenda from the heady evening of her coming-out party (cost: a reported $60,000) in 1938. Moaned she, more than a decade later: "Being a glamour girl is the worst thing that can happen to you." In Manhattan, after she got news of Kelly's Florida action last week, Brenda sighed: "I'm not too surprised. But I hadn't expected Ship to file the suit quite so soon."