The Winner
Miss America 1946, decided the Atlantic City judges after a close study of the innate and acquired talents of 16 vaselike finalists, was that fair-skinned, blue-eyed brunette, the 123-lb. one with the 25½-in. waist, 35½-in. bust, 36-in. hips, 22½-in. thigh, 13½-in. calf, and 8½-in. ankle —that 21-year-old one from California, name of Marilyn Buferd. "Oh my God," said Miss Buferd, "I never expected it." New York Post Columnist Earl Wilson immediately interviewed her. Had she any foibles? "Pardon me," retorted Miss Buferd icily, "I don't understand."
Love among the Artists
Edmund ("Bunny") Wilson, 51-year-old scholar-gypsy of the intelligentsia whose "novel" of suburban sex life (Memoirs of Hecate County) has been a scandalous success, got dug into himself by Manhattan tabloids. Court records showed that he had been successfully sued last March for separation by Wife No. 3: left-wing gypsy authoress Mary McCarthy, whose scandalous storybook, The Company She Keeps, included one called Cruel and Barbarous Treatment. Said she, she had received "abusive treatment" from Critic Wilson, cited the time he had kicked her out of bed. She said she complained the following morning ("I won't stand for this," she cried), and he promptly gave her a black eye. Authoress McCarthy got her alimony award just before Hecate became a profitable bestseller. The award: $60 a week.
Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, most publicized and most meticulous painter of deliquescence and decay, gave his new bride, the late Publisher Joe Patterson's daughter Josephine, a $125,000 present (his own estimate). The present: his famed That Which I Should Have Done, I Did Not Do—a careful study of a mouldering wax funeral wreath on a grumous door.
Nancy Bruff, whose high-pressured novel The Manatee made her one of Park Avenue's greatest women writers, celebrated the pleasures of motherhood in a little piece for the New York Journal-American. In conclusion she informed her readers: "As for myself, I hope to produce another book and another baby next year."
Fugitives
Eugene O'Neill and Greta Garbo, dodge-the-press champions in the men's and women's divisions, briefly stopped dodging, met the press head on—but separately—in Manhattan.
O'Neill, 57, gaunt, greying, his hands ashake with paralysis agitans, was in town for rehearsals of The Iceman Cometh (his first play on Broadway in twelve years). He said he had written nothing since 1943. "I hope to resume writing as soon as I can," said he, "but the war has thrown me completely off base.... I have to get back to a sense of writing being worthwhile. ... I'd have to pretend."