(2 of 3)
Garbo, 40 but unwrinkled, back from a two-months' visit to her native Sweden, dodged the question of whether she had dodged the press. "I have not been elusive," said she. "It's simply that I think being in the papers is silly. . . . Anyone who does a job properly has a right to privacy." She had not done a cinema job in six years. Did she plan to make another picture? "No." What would she do now? "I'm sort of drifting." There was a report that she would marry. "Oh, is there? Well, well." What was that perfume she was wearing? "I haven't any." Garbo had an idea: "You take your friends," said she to one of the reporters, "and go home. That is better. You go have coffee."
Slings & Arrows
Ronald Colman, 55, was in a Santa Monica hospital with infection and fever, but his doctor said he was "going to come through all right."
Bishop William T. Manning of New York, 80, down with arthritis at his summer home, had to beg off hearing the Archbishop of Canterbury preach at Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Admiral Marc A. Mitscher, 59, commander of the Eighth Fleet, was progressing "quite satisfactorily" after an emergency appendectomy in Malta.
President Anastasio Somozo, 50, arrived in Boston in his uniform of a general of the Nicaraguan Army, entered a clinic for an intestinal operation.
Senator Theodore G. Bilbo and his sore mouth, recovered from surgery in New Orleans, went quietly home.
Muggers
Kathleen Norris, grande dame of serial fictioneers, bravely got into character for a role in a Los Gatos, Calif. pageant (see cut). Her awful task: to play mama cat in a pantomime of the Three Little Kittens nursery rhyme.
Lillian & Dorothy Gish, 49 and 48, encountered cameras when they returned from a two-month trip to Europe, fell into natural poses, looked as if they had hardly budged since their early days in silents—when Dorothy played the bright-eyed parts and Lillian the sweet ones (see cut).
Bob Hope finally had proof he could be funny without reciting somebody else's gags: in Denver, surgeons removed a chicken bone from a woman who had swallowed it while laughing at Hope's photograph.
Royalty
Ex-King Humbert of Italy, whose home-from-home has been an ancient, ghost-gusty villa near Lisbon, no longer had to go to bed by candlelight. The Portuguese Government quietly installed a lighting system (by night, so as not to upset Humbert's sensitive wife, Marie Jose), and the old place blazed with electricity for the first time in its gloomy history. The ghosts faded away. But now patches on the upholstery and worn spots on the rugs showed. And Marie José wished for oil lamps. They were "more romantic," said she.