(2 of 3)
"I'm going to get sodden drunk so Mother will know how it looks and will stop her drinking," said Jesse Lauriston Livermore Jr., 16, schoolboy son of the famed stock market trader, when he returned to his mother's home at Montecito, Calif., late Thanksgiving evening. In the big pink stucco house Mrs. Dorothea Livermore, who divorced Trader Livermore in 1932, was giving a drinking party. Son Jesse began downing a quart of whiskey. Screamed tipsy Mrs. Livermore: "I'd rather see you dead than drinking!" Son Jesse lurched into another room, returned with one of the guns he found there. Challenged he: "You haven't the nerve to shoot me." Up stepped one D. B. Neville, who originally went to the household as Jesse's brother's tutor, remained as his mother's fiance. Tutor Neville took the gun away, left mother & son alone. Few minutes later he heard a shot, found Jesse Livermore Jr. lying in a pool of blood. On the floor beside him his mother was clutching a rifle, sobbing: "I've shot my son. He dared me to." Taken to a hospital, where doctors found him too weak to stand the removal of a bullet which had sheared through one lung and lodged in his liver, Son Jesse gasped: "It was my fault, I guess. It was an accident." Next morning Mrs. Livermore sobered up enough to blame it all on a letter she had received from her onetime husband. "He said I kept his letters from our sons," she babbled miserably. "He said a lot of things. It upset me, unstrung me.'' On the floor of the St. Louis Merchants Exchange where he is currently reported making his third fortune after his second bankruptcy, Jesse Livermore Sr. was notified of the shooting. Silently he and his third wife took plane for California. On the second day doctors operated to drain fluid from the boy's pierced lung, still dared not touch the bullet. Uncertain whether he would live, police jailed Mrs. Livermore for attempted murder. Up & down the hospital corridor paced Jesse Livermore Sr., swearing that if his son died he would "spend every cent to see that she gets what is coming to her.'' Alarmed by a 14% increase in ten months in the number of women taking the "Keeley Cure" for drunkenness, Martin Nelson, secretary of the Keeley Institute at Dwight, Ill., predicted a race of "feminine barflies." Of his new "lady drunkards," 90% are married, 77% are housewives. Bound to convince the chronically apologetic members of the American Society of London that he does not really consider Manhattan a huge fleshpot, Baron Hewart, Lord Chief Justice of England, patted his round stomach and expanded: "Why, if Oliver Cromwell were alive today and seeking to find the company most congenial to him he would probably find it on the 40th floor of an apartment building in New York." Becoming a chorus-girl in London, 21-year-old Sarah Churchill, daughter of Winston Churchill, announced: "My parents are putting up no objections. I made up my mind to become an actress when I was in socks." Down upon a San Francisco landing field flew Cinemactress Claudette Colbert and a throat specialist named Dr. Joel J. Pressman. Because an airline clerk had booked them as "Dr. & Mrs. J. J. Pressman," newscameramen were waiting. Deserting Miss Colbert, Dr. Pressman fled across the field,