Expected by Professor Salvatore Piccoli, obstetrician to H. R. H. Crown Princess Marie-Jose of Italy: her first child "about July first."

Born. To Albert James ("Albie") Booth Jr., Yale's 1931 football captain, and Marion Noble Booth; a daughter (first child); in New Haven, Conn., where Booth now promotes a professional basketball team, plans to sell insurance in the spring. Weight: 6 Ib. 13 oz.

Engaged. John Jacob Astor III, 20, posthumous son of John Jacob Astor (drowned on S. S. Titanic), $3,000,000 heir on his 21st birthday; and Donna Cristiana Torlonia, Manhattan socialite, daughter of Rome's Prince Marino TorIonia.

Married. Alice Muriel Astor Obolensky, 31, sister of Vincent Astor, divorced wife of Prince Serge Platonovitch Obolensky Neledinsky Meletsky (of Russia's oldest noble family); and Raimund von Hofmannsthal, 26, Austrian writer, son of Richard Strauss's late librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal; secretly; in Newark, N. J.

Married. John Alden Carpenter, 56, Chicago businessman-composer; and Ellen Waller Borden, 47, Chicago socialite; both for the second time; in Cambridge, Mass, (see p. 25).

Marriage Annulled. Marion Talley Raucheisen, 26, Kansas City's coloratura soprano (Metropolitan Opera Company debut, 1926; retirement, 1929); and Michael Raucheisen, 43, German pianist; in Long Beach. Calif. Grounds: immediately after the wedding last June, the groom ordered out the bride's mother & sister.

Birthdays. Oldest U. S. Doctor Merritt H. Eddy, 100; Wilhelm Hohenzollern, 74; Charles Curtis, 73; Daniel Willard, 72; Walter Johannes Damrosch, 71; Antonio Scotti, 67; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 51; Auguste Piccard, 49.

Appointed. John Ramsay Allardyce Nicoll, 38, professor of English language & literature at the University of London: to be drama professor and chairman of Yale's drama department, succeeding famed George Pierce Baker, 66, after his retirement next June.

Died. Sara Teasdale Filsinger, 48, U. S. poetess of nostalgia, Pulitzer prize-winner (1918); by drowning in her bathtub, following pneumonia, a nervous breakdown, a debate with her nurse on suicide technique; in Manhattan. Divorced in 1929 from Ernst B. Filsinger, foreign trade expert, onetime vice president of Royal Baking Powder Co., her prize-winning Love Songs included the stanza:

When I am dead and over me bright April Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,

Though you should lean above me brokenhearted, I shall not care.

Other books: Rivers to the Sea, Flame &

Shadow, Dark of the Moon, Stars Tonight (1930).

Died. Raymond Davis, 49, U. S. Consul at Prague, Czechoslovakia; by diving from a hotel staircase onto a marble table near which his wife sat; in Prague.

Died. Lewis J. Selznick, 62, cinema dynast; of diabetes; in Los Angeles. Once a jeweler, he sold out when he found that the cinema business required less brains than anything else in the world, ran $1,000 into $105,000 profits in ten weeks. Banking on optimism, salesmanship, electric-lit sidewalk displays (his were the first), and play adaptations, he dominated the film industry until 1923 when creditors thrust him into bankruptcy. Biggest Selznick star was Clara Kimball Young. Intermittent feuds with Adolph Zukor, often his partner, ruined Producer Selznick. His sons Myron (script agent) and David, RKO executive vice-president, carry on the dynasty.

Died. John Galsworthy, 65, English satirist of the possessor class (The Forsyte Saga), poet, playright (Old English, Loyalties): of uremia, following an illness which prevented him from personally receiving his Nobel Prize last year; in London. At his death bedside were his wife, nephew, cook, chauffeur. Educated at Harrow (where he captained football) and Oxford, he took up admiralty law. He is credited with having been one of the first to encourage Seaman Joseph Conrad, whom he met on an ocean voyage, to write. Three years later Lawyer Galsworthy followed his own advice. In 1918 he declined to be knighted.

Died. Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, 80, retired Manhattan social grandee who divorced the late William Kissam Vanderbilt to marry the late Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont; of heart and bronchial disease; in Paris, France (see p. 17).

Died. William Stryker Gummere. 80, longtime (since 1901) Chief Justice of New Jersey's Supreme Court, baseball enthusiast (greatest centrefielder in Princeton history), inventor of the base-running slide (1870); of pneumonia & pleurisy; in Newark, N. J. Son-in-law of New Jersey's onetime Chief Justice Mercer Beasley, his most famed ruling (1898) limited damages for a child's death to the parents' probable profit if the child had lived, added that the average child ended as its parents' pecuniary debtor. He long resented newspaper translation of this as fixing the value of a child's life at 6-c-.

Died. George Edward Bateman Saintsbury, 87, famed English writers' writer, critics' critic, vintners' wine connoisseur; of old age; in Bath, England. On his last birthday, London's Saintsbury Club of literary wine-bibbers wined in his name on Tio Pepe sherry, 1830 Madeira, Batard Montrachet 1926, Pontet-Canet 1920, Chateau Latour 1878, 1851 port. Hines Brandy 1844. Saintsbury, ill, lay home in bed. Best-known books: Notes on a Cellar Book, A History of Criticism, Loci Critici, The Later Nineteenth Century, A History of English Prosody, Corrected Impressions, A Last Scrapbook (1924).

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