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Not unnaturally many brilliant French spinsters like 35-year-old Eve Curie are in no hurry to tie themselves down. She has had fun these many years globetrotting, has partied with Playwright Henri Bernstein, Condé Nast, Lucius Beebe, French Ambassador Comte de Saint-Quentin, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt.
"She Has Everything!" Shelved recently in Hollywood was a scenario completed by Aldous Huxley to put Greta Garbo in the role of Marie Sklodovska, the sweetly wooden-looking Polish lass who saved the rubles she earned as a governess in Imperial Russia, came to Paris an eager student and married her distinguished Physics Professor Pierre Curie.
Daughter Irène was born in 1897. Next year her parents announced the discovery of radium and Mme Curie recorded that Irene was saying "Gogli, gogli, go." Daughter Eve came in 1904 and for her happiness at home that was several years too late. By the time Eve was a romping youngster who could and would bolt a whole box of chocolates at a sitting, Irene was already the brilliant but mechanical and efficient student who, when given chocolates, put the box away in a drawer, extracted and ate one piece a day, generally forgot chocolates altogether before the box was half empty.
It has been no wonder that the late Professor and Mme Curie, Daughter Irène and her scientist husband Professor Jean Frèdéric Joliot, thought Eve something of a flibbertigibbet. Eve took to music and Bohemia. She became a concert pianist, escaped straightway into a Paris that her scientist family will never know. "I don't hate Science, it just terrifies me!" says Eve.
Terrified of trading on the family name, because unkind people always say that is what she does, Miss Curie got into writing music criticism for various Paris papers under a pen name. From this she drifted into adapting Broadway plays for the Paris stage. Spread Eagle she did over into a successful French production staged as 145 Wall Street in Paris in 1932.
Marie Curie died two years later and after a decent interval U. S. publishers began badgering her daughter to do a biography. Eve was willing, but both terrified and lazy. She had to be constantly jogged by her publishers, but finally turned out a smooth, satisfying and deeply human work which Vincent Sheean ably translated. Others of her writer friends like Louis Bromfield promptly boosted Miss Curie to the skies in U. S. Sunday supplements. Since then she has been a best-seller in her own right.
"When I think of her, she is somehow associated with softly falling snow, not because she is cold," wrote Louis of Eve in the conservative New York Herald Tribune. "It is something that has to do with the freshness and beauty and soft glittering quality of snow. . . . She is like Diana. ... I realize that what I have written may sound rhapsodical, yet I only feel that my effort has been inadequate. She is a woman — in the common vivid speech of our times — who has every thing."