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Philip Van Doren Stern, Manhattan publisher, was noted by The Saturday Review of Literature's Columnist Bennett Cerf for his quick response to a suggestion that Armed Services Editions (of which he is an editor) print The Ten Commandments. Mulled Stern, who once worked for best-selling literary treasurers Simon & Schuster: "How about using only five of them and calling it A Treasury of the World's Best Commandments?"
Athletes
Johnny Weissmuller, continuing his one-man, one-lifetime, evolutionary ascent from the cinema's ape-man to man (TIME, March 6). gave up his crowning Tarzan glory (see cut).
Betty Hutton, loose-jointed, incendiary blonde (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek), was told that she had cracked three ribs after being tossed by a team of acrobats during the filming of Incendiary Blonde.
Dr. George Morris Dorrance, Philadelphia's soup-rich (Campbell) facial surgeon, was saved from drowning in a high surf at Palm Beach's Bath & Tennis Club by munitions-rich Lammot du Pont and two naval officers.
Wonderland Week
Jennifer Jones (24-year-old, Tulsa-born Mrs. Phylis Isley Walker) was canonized by the cinema for her first starring performance—as the sainted peasant girl in The Song of Bernadette. As she took her Oscar from last year's winner, Greer Garson, the brown-haired, brown-eyed one-time Western player bit her lip, smiled and said: "I am thrilled and I am grateful." For his anti-Nazi stand in Watch on the Rhine, grave-toned Paul Lukas led the men. Other statuettes: 1) best film of 1943, Casablanca; 2) best director, Casablanca's Michael Curtiz; 3) best supporting actor, Charles Coburn in The More the Merrier; 4) best supporting actress, Greek-born Katina Paxinou—for her fire-&-ice Pilar in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Salvador Dali, super-successful surrealist, explained—in glossy Town & Country —how he did it: ''I am quite probably the artist who works the hardest." Dali said he wrote his "long and boring" forthcoming novel in four New Hampshire months of '"fourteen implacable hours" of work a day. His heroine, Solange de Cleda, is a symbol of what he calls Cledalism—"pleasure and pain sublime in an all-transcending identification with the object."
Dorothy Lamour received a letter from a Czechoslovakian soldier stationed in Great Britain: "I love you very much. I dream about you every night. Please send me a carton of American cigarets."
(Ole) Olson & (Chic) Johnson, hellza-poppers, told United Press Hollywood correspondent Frederick Othman that their monkey-wrench minds were already at work on the sets of their new snow: Jerks Berserk. Some of their newest secret weapons: eight seats in the third row which drop customers into the cellar, hot-water drinking fountains, dachshunds coached to steal the shoes of foot-easing women.
Loretta Young, gazelle-eyed, 31-year-old cinemactress, vacationing at Palm Springs, confided to the press that she expected her first in the fall. Ex-wife of Cinemactor Grant Withers, wife of Lieut. Colonel Thomas Lewis, peacetime radio advertising man, she has an adopted daughter Judy, 8.