Dorothy Arnold, sometime actress who divorced Joe DiMaggio in 1944, was worried. Joe and their nine-year-old son, Joe Jr., had been seen frolicking at Hollywood's flossy Bel Air Hotel swimming pool—and Joe's friend, luscious Cinemactress Marilyn (Clash by Night) Monroe, was also there in the unlikely role of young Joe's governess. Dorothy went to court to ask that Joe be ordered to stop taking the boy to places that are long on liquor, short on other children. Marilyn merely said: "I want to love and be loved more than anything else in the world."
In Manhattan, Comic Henry Morgan, who two years ago was vaguely linked with subversive organizations by the publication Red Channels, admitted that his jokes have sold more & more badly since then. His regular income has dived from $8,250 a week to the mere $45 he now gets for writing a newspaper column. Obviously, claimed Henry in court, he can no longer pay $150-a-week temporary alimony to his estranged wife Isobel. The judge saw it Henry's way, ordered Isobel's weekly stipend cut to $50.
Sitting down to a breakfast of two boiled eggs with some Communist cronies somewhere in China, the Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, Britain's white-eaved "Red Dean" of Canterbury, told his delighted friends about capitalist misery back home. "In England we never see eggs," he chortled. "I see here you have plenty."
New Directions
Touring England in George Bernard Shaw's The Millionairess, Actress Katharine Hepburn got an invitation in New-castle-on-Tyne to step out with 350 visiting sailors from two U.S. destroyers. Resourcefully she barred all visitors to her hotel room, had her phone disconnected, rushed straight back into seclusion after the show. Later she explained: "I fear no man. I hate being crowded by people, and sailors are people."
Boston's Radio Station WBMS announced an eloquent addition to its staff: James M. Curley, 77, four-time Boston mayor, sometime Massachusetts governor, congressman and convict (using the mails to defraud). Curley's contract specifies that he may talk about anything during his hour-long program, three times a week, but must not be called a "disk jockey."
Five federal judges decided that Novelist Kathleen Winsor is no novelist, thus bearing out the literary critics who always claimed that Forever Amber, her lusty epic of Restoration England, is no novel. The question before the court: should the $165,000 Kathleen got for movie rights to Amber be taxed as author's income or, at a lower rate, as a non-author's capital gain? The judges' ruling: "The book was written . . . primarily because she enjoyed" it, not with a publication "purpose in mind." To Capital-Gainer Winsor and former husband (No. 1 of three) Robert Herwig, the court awarded a 1945 tax refund of $26,358.72 each.
On a Manhattan TV show, two Metropolitan Opera stars, Baritone Robert Merrill, 33, and Soprano Roberta Peters, 21, who were married on March 30, achieved some close harmony in the romantic Sweethearts duet from Victor Herbert's operetta. Five days later they signed legal separation papers. Soprano Peters' claim: incompatibility.