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1945: Bernarr ("Body Beautiful") Macfadden, still full of beans at 77, hired Manhattan's Carnegie Hall to get a few things off his manly chest. Before a healthy audience of some 2,000, he flailed clerical prudery, and plumped for the healthy life and for good clean sex ("The sexes were never made to be separated"). The white-maned publisher, clad in suit and shoes to match, did push-ups and headstands (calculated to prolong life from ten to 25 years), warned women: "Beauty must be associated with a good digestion."
1946: George Bernard Shaw, the world's greatest living literary figure, turned 90, and had a high old time of it. All day long a procession of literary pilgrims plodded through his Ayot St. Lawrence home near London. Some birthday shafts:
¶ "All my life affection has been showered on me, and every forward step I took has been taken in spite of it."
¶ "It is sometimes necessary to make people laugh to prevent them from hanging you."
¶ "A lady aged 102, when I asked her what life was like at her age, said, 'Nothing but buttoning and unbuttoning.' Not much to look forward to, is it?" 1947: Barbara Hutton, 34, was having some more despite her famed swearing-off statement of last April. ("You can't go on being a fool forever," she said then.) The synthetically svelte heiress married her fourth in a snowy Swiss town, Chur. The groom was a Lithuanian prince—handsome Igor Troubetzkoy.
"What sort of a woman is Barbara, anyway?" demanded the Prince's mother, Princess Katherine, back home in Nice. She was not optimistic: "I've always been afraid of American women."
1948: After 21 months of marriage (her second, his sixth), brunette Novelist Kathleen (Forever Amber) Winsor told the judge about life with her clarinet-tooting husband, Artie Shaw. In 31 pages of searing affidavit, Kathleen swore that Artie had screamed at her, beaten her, come home "drunken, abusive, and belligerent." He had also tried out on her his favorite theory of domestic relations ("The only way to keep a woman in line—be a caveman"). "He boasted of having thrown Lana Turner [Mrs. Shaw No. 3] down a flight of stairs, and said that it improved their marriage considerably. He told me that he had kicked Ava Gardner [Mrs. Shaw No. 5] several times and that she had 'responded nobly.' "
Artie answered right back with 28 pages of tart countersuit. Kathleen, he charged, had refused to bear children ("Children have always enslaved women") and had even suggested an operation which, as the N.Y. Daily News gleefully phrased it, would have made him "forever sterile." And anyway, he added, neither of their Mexican divorces was legal, and so he figures that he is still the lawful wedded husband of Ava.
1949: Sam Goldwyn's troubles with the language were officially immortal. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations had now recorded two of the most celebrated Goldwynisms: "In two words: impossible," and the ever fresh "Include me out."
1950: Cinemactress Joan Crawford, 42, who started out as a Chicago nightclub dancer even before the days of the Charleston,