(5 of 11)
1951: In a Manhattan court, Mrs. Evyleen R. Cronin, 58, onetime secretary-companion and maid to Tallulah Bankhead, was charged with stealing more than $4,000 from her former employer by raising and forging checks. The money was used, cried the defendant's lawyer, to buy things for Miss Bankhead—"Cocaine, marijuana, liquor, booze, whisky, champagne and sex." Retorted outraged lava-voiced Tallulah: "Of course I drink. But nobody has to kite checks to pay for my liquor." As for dope: "Even if I had been getting it—which I certainly wasn't—do you think I'd have been paying for it by check?" But what made Actress Bankhead angriest was the mention of sex. Rumbled she: "God knows I never have had to buy sex."
1952: A New York Times reporter asked Author Truman (The Grass Harp) Capote, 27, to describe himself. Said Capote: "Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy. I think I have rather heated eyes . . . Do you want to know the real reason why I push my hair down on my forehead? Because I have two cowlicks. If I didn't push my hair forward, it would make me look as though I had two feathery horns."
1953: In Manhattan, Actress Diana Barrymore began her evening by pub-crawling with an off-duty policeman ("He has a wife, two children and a Buick and must be nameless"). Returning home after midnight, she found her husband Robert Wilcox arguing with another rival named John McNeill ("I kept saying 'Shut up, boys, shut up, don't be so Hemingway-feudal' "). After two fights ("I said, 'Boys, don't kill anyone in the apartment; it would be awfully messy' "), McNeill was carted off to the hospital for scalp repairs. Diana ordered her husband to pack his things and move out. To the reporters she explained that her own black eye had resulted from a domestic tiff four days earlier ("I don't mind being punched. Noel Coward said that women should be struck regularly like a gong and he's right"). In conclusion, she observed thoughtfully, "Women are no damn good."
1954: Romance came at last to Broadway Critic George Jean Nathan, 72, iconoclastic sniper-in-arms (in the '20s) of H.L. Mencken. Announced Nathan, from Manhattan's Royalton Hotel, where he has lived as a bachelor for 48 years: he would soon marry wraithlike Actress Julie Haydon, 44, with whom he has been keeping company for 17 years. Julie last appeared on Broadway nine years ago as a wispy cripple in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. "The best woman," Nathan once wrote, "is the inferior of the second-best man . . . To enjoy women at all, one must manufacture an illusion and envelop them with it; otherwise they would not be endurable." Last week Prospective Bridegroom Nathan said: "I found the right girl at last."
1955: In Hollywood's main bout of the week, redhaired, spitfire Cinemactress Susan (I'll Cry Tomorrow) Hayward, 34, weighing in at 112 Ibs., fought a one-round free-for-all to a draw with yellow-haired Starlet Jil (A Twinkle in God's Eye) Jarmyn, 23, and