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1939: When Cinemactress Katharine Hepburn drove past him near Wilmington, Del., State Trooper Joseph Shannon stopped her "because she looked too young to drive a car." Later he declared: "I soon found out she was not a kid. She was a regular little wildcat. She shrieked . . . and generally acted like a bunch of wildfire."
1940: Playwright Noel Coward, visiting the U.S. for the first time since the war began, divulged his formula for enduring during air raids: "When the warning sounds I gather up some pillows, a pack of cards and a bottle of gin, tuck myself beneath the stairs and do very nicely with the consolations of a drink and solitaire until 'All Clear' sounds."
1941: A furor in Newport over the dilapidation of Mrs. James Jay Coogan's empty mansion on aristocratic Catherine Street turned the spotlight on one of the world's wealthiest recluses: for 25 years Mrs. Coogan, now well into her 80s, has seldom left her Manhattan hotel suite in the daytime, but each night at 9 o'clock she goes down in the freight elevator heavily veiled, drives to her cubbyhole office in a loft building, puts in five hours administering her real-estate fortune (which includes Coogan's Bluff, the Polo Grounds where the Giants play). She never answers letters, for years has hardly glanced at a newspaper. But before her Tammany husband died in 1915 she spent eight years vainly trying to crash Newport society. The book found on her bedroom table in Newport was Burke's Peerage—for 1910.
1942: Dorothy Lamour was refused entrance to the Glenn L. Martin plane plant at Middle River, Md., on the ground that a slow-up for ogling "might cost us half a bomber."
1943: A few days after 18-year-old Oona O'Neill had described her eight-month acquaintance with Charles Chaplin as "entirely on the esoteric side," the comedian packed sleek, sloe-eyed Oona into a car, picked up the certificate and a case of champagne at Santa Barbara, sped to coastal Carpinteria, nervously found the finger for her first and his fourth wedding ring, hid himself and his bride somewhere in Montecito. Only the week before he had agreed to pay his pre-Oona protegee Joan Berry $2,500 down, legal costs, and support until the blood test which may or may not show that he did not father her unborn child. From the white house in the San Francisco hills where Chaplin's new, recently ailing father-in-law Eugene O'Neill works with his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, on a long awaited cycle of plays, no word came. Said Joan Berry: "He can't do this to us."
1944: Frank ("The Voice") Sinatra, patent-leather-lunged idol, opened a three-week engagement at Manhattan's mammoth Paramount Theater, got the usual screaming reception from 30,000 bow-tied, bobby-soxed fans, who caused such a commotion that the Police Department responded with 421 policemen, 20 policewomen, 20 patrol cars, two trucks. The excitement had scarcely died down two days later, when an 18-year-old boy stood up in the theater, threw an egg that smacked Sinatra squarely between the eyes. The egger, Alexander Ivanovich Dorogo-kupetz, was mobbed by Sinatra's fans but rescued by police and ushers. Said Doro-gokupetz: "I vowed to put an end to