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"The world today cannot keep a happy equilibrium with my gossip and the atom bomb," announced Veteran Telltale Elsa Maxwell, who had decided to give up her column for good. "What is gossip after all but unkind things said, usually not even based on fact or the truth? I can't add all that trouble to those that already exist, so I have taken up my music [she used to play the violin], my best old, old friends and the quiet peace of quiet living."
A Sea of Trouble
Shirley May France, 18, decided that her "slave-driving father" was just as tough to take as the English Channel, upped & left her home in Somerset, Mass. to move in with her swimming coach, Harry Boudikian, 35, and his wife Elsie. When father France threatened to go to court to get her back, she went to stay with some school chums in Fall River, but assured the press that she was through with swimming forever: "From now on, my favorite sport is softball."
After Communist-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy failed to pay a state income tax for the fourth year in a row, the Wisconsin tax commission asked him to prove that his deductions exceeded his income of $66,938 for the period.
Italy's No. 1 Red Palmiro Togliatti, who barely escaped death in 1948 when a Sicilian gunman pumped three bullets into him, was severely injured when the driver of his fast-moving grey Aprilia sedan swerved to avoid a fruit truck, crashed into an embankment and overturned twice.
Nabbed for speeding along a Connecticut highway at 70 miles an hour: radio's Superman, Michael Fitzmorris.
Bandless and jobless, Mohammedanized Trumpet Player Dizzy Gillespie, high priest of polyphonic jazz, was forced to admit to Down Beat that bop was done for: "Everybody wants you to play what they call dance music. What they mean is that ticky-ticky-tick stuff."
Women at Work
Clara (The "It" Girl) Bow, forty-five-ish, auburn-haired epitome of flaming youth in the roaring '20s ,whose truckload of boy friends included an Hungarian, an Italian, an Indian and young Gary Cooper, was still threatening to write her memoirs.
But, she said, "I don't want [the book] to be a sort of amber in color—you know, Forever Amber—I want to say something pleasant about people and if I can't, I just want to leave them out. Naturally, I'll talk about my mother, who died when I was twelve. It was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn sort of thing. It has lots of other highlights: it'll take in the trial—you know, this Daisy [De Boe] trial. Well, she was my secretary and she blackmailed me ... It won't be a sob story either . . . It'll be sort of a helpful story to girls who want to try for pictures and are very poor . . ."
Violet Attlee, 53, comely, dynamic wife of Great Britain's Clem, enrolled for training in the ambulance section of London County's civil defense corps.
Over the protests of the neighbors, Tobacco Heiress Doris Duke, 37, got the go-ahead signal from Hillsborough Township to build a perfumed piggery housing some 3,000 corn-fed porkers on her 2,300-acre New Jersey estate.