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VICENTE BLASCO IBÁÑEZ. terrible-tempered, anticlerical novelist, was looking for a female lead for the movie of his novel. Blood and Sand, when at a party he met pious, vixen-toothed Actress Nita ("Nixie") Naldi, who screamed forthwith: "You Bolshevik! You heathen! . . . You worm! You Pagan! You anti-Christ!" Ibanez shrilled back so excitedly that his -'upper plate fell out of his mouth into Nixie's bosom." Whereupon the hostess, "who had hoped for a stimulating evening, but not this stimulating, quickly reached down into Nixie, pulled out the teeth, rinsed them in the punch bowl, and pushed them back into [Ibánez'] mouth." Nixie got the part.
IGOR STRAVINSKY was such a firebird that he loved going to the zoo "to watch the wild animals at feeding time, when they devoured the raw meat." But in mien and in amour he was "so disciplined, so logical, so conservative." Dagmar's heart leaped when, at long last, Igor bent forward and murmured: "Come tomorrow night"—then added: "I so want you to meet my wife." Igor and Dagmar "would sit for hours sipping Dubonnet while he unburdened himself" and inveighed against his critics. "Why do they blame me for my music?" he would rage. "Why don't they blame God? He gave me my gifts!" His mother refused to attend the famed Paris première of the Sacre du Printemps because, she said, "I don't think it's my kind of music."
*Violinist Leopold Godowsky Jr.. Dagmar's brother, is co-inventor (with Leopold Mannes) of Kodachrome color film.