Down & Out
Ida Lupino, sharp-faced cinema minx, fell victim to a popular domestic hazard when she slipped in her bathtub, was kept to her home with a sprained neck.
Drew Pearson, who has long hobnobbed with top-drawer Washington society, was unceremoniously dropped from the just-issued 1945 edition of the swank Washington Social List. The explanation: sharp-sniping, chitchatting Columnist Pearson "gets into too many controversies and has trodden on too many toes."
Pablo Picasso announced that he had joined the French Communist Party, two days later learned that 15 of his sensationally experimental paintings (on exhibition at the annual Salon d'Automne) had been torn down by a Parisian mob, which fled in true Parisian style before the police could identify anybody.
Honors List
Major General Robert Eliot ("Roy") Urquhart, 42-year-old, Scottish-born, red-bereted commander of the gallant British Red Devils, who fought through nine days of hell at Arnhem, was knighted as a Commander of the Bath.
Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, tiaraed Queen of New York's and Newport's Old Guard society, won a new title when her partygoing set started a parlor-game fad of tagging socialites with appropriate literary titles. She is now known to her intimates as the Queen of Sheba.
Lieut. Commander James Edward Van Zandt, 45, onetime commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, onetime isolationist and anglophobic U.S. Congressman from Pennsylvania, who volunteered for Navy action when the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor, got a Legion of Merit from General MacArthur for "splendid performance of duty" as commander of assault waves in "sustained operations against the enemy."
Irvin S. (for Shrewsbury) Cobb, famed American humorist, whose last touch of humor—revealed after his death last March—was a request for a simple, "cheerful" funeral with his ashes to be buried under a dogwood tree in his hometown of Paducah, Ky., had his wish granted in every detail but one: when the dogwood tree was planted over the grave, his desire that there be "no long faces and no show of grief" went unobserved.
Temperamental Differences
Lupe Velez, tamale-tempered cinemactress, breezed into Manhattan all set to star in a forthcoming Broadway musical, Glad to See You, promptly saw that "the script did not suit my personality." New York Post. Columnist Earl Wilson, thought it might be her temperament, got told off by volcanic Miss Velez : "Tamparamant ! I hate people with Tamparamant! "
Arthur Rodzinski, brush-haired, Dalmatian-born conductor of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, played conventional Bach and Beethoven for the opening concert of the orchestra's 103rd season in Carnegie Hall, then gave convention the boot by playing an encore—George Gershwin's jazzy / Got Rhythm. Although the first Philharmonic encore in many years brought down the house, it struck the New York Times's staid music critic, Olin Downes, as "an unwise impulse."