Unprivate Lives (Cont'd}

P:Expecting to occupy the Royal Box, there arrived at the Covent Garden Royal Opera one night last week dashing Prince Arthur of Connaught, son of the venerable Duke of Connaught who is the only surviving son of Queen Victoria. After a whispered altercation with opera flunkies who insisted, "There is some misunderstanding, Your Highness," Prince Arthur and his visibly vexed party were shown into an ordinary box. Reason: although Mrs. Simpson was seated unobtrusively in the shadowed rear of the Royal Box, she was none the less occupying it, in the absence of King Edward in South Wales. With Mrs. Simpson was a large party of whom the ostensible hostess was Maude Alice ("Emerald") Lady Cunard. As usual, stately Lady Cunard was in full sail with her famed cargo of rubies. Mrs. Simpson, who was recently provided with a $750,000 emerald and diamond necklace (TIME, Oct. 12), wore last week only a new set of diamonds. Next morning London society columns omitted Mrs. Simpson but named every other occupant of the Royal Box. This sort of malicious snub recently provoked His Majesty personally to write Mrs. Simpson's name in his Court Circular and thus force the London Times to print it (TIME, Oct. 26), but last week Editor Dawson of the Times appeared to be again baiting his King- Emperor.

P:William Randolph Hearst, still championing a marriage of King Edward & Mrs. Simpson, had his London correspondents stop 100 people last week and ask them whether they were pro or con--a laborious process since it involved explaining about the King & Mrs. Simpson to British subjects, most of whom have never heard of her. Next day Hearst papers announced that 80 of the 100 questioned declared themselves in favor of such a match. Hearstmen then queried British officials in every Dominion and in India without finding any who cared to go on record as opposed to a marriage of the King-Emperor and Wallis Warfield Simpson.

P:The British Mothers Union, of which Queen Mary is a patroness, was reported by the New York Times to have adopted last week in its 13,000 branches (membership: 577,000) an attitude of "anxious concern." The Pauline Revere who is at tempting to spread news of the King & Mrs. Simpson among organized British Mothers was identified as Mrs. Frank Theodore Woods, widow of the Bishop of Winchester, who resides at Hampton Court in an apartment at the disposal of King Edward. In the circumstances His Majesty is unlikely to turn Mrs. Woods out of Hampton Court, and she was reported to have laid before members of the Central Council of the Mothers Union a proposal that Bachelor Edward VIII be waked upon by delegations of British Mothers who will "implore His Majesty to do nothing which could be construed as weakening the moral fibre of the British nation."*

P:Baron Beaverbrook, most powerful press tycoon of Fleet Street, arrived in Manhattan on the Bremen last week to face reporters eager to get at the bottom of why his Daily Express and other London papers have not printed the Mrs. Simpson story. "You are the censor!" cried a reporter. Replied Lord Beaverbrook, "Who? Me?"*

P:In the Department of Justice building in Washington last week Actress Betty Compton made a discovery which her genial husband James J. ("Jimmy") Walker communicated to Attorney General Cummings thus: "Say, General, that's a fine picture of Wally Simpson in one of your murals (see cut)./- There's no doubt about its being a perfect likeness!" Replied the Attorney General, "Is that so?"

P:King Edward, after his "Errand of Mercy" in South Wales last week, sped home with one of those colds against which Mrs. Simpson is always wrapping him up warmly** (TIME, Nov. 3 et ante). His Majesty had dinner with Mrs. Simpson and her chaperon "Aunt Bessie," returned next day to take tea, later carried Mrs. Simpson & Aunt Bessie off to his suburban snuggery for the weekend. At the press office in Buckingham Palace it was explained that King Edward will spend Dec. 25 and 26 with Queen Mary, Dec. 27 with Mrs. Simpson & Aunt Bessie.

P:The King & Mrs. Simpson & Aunt Bessie were warned of possible foul play by Manhattan's Daily News in the mass-conscious vein of its Publisher Joseph Medill Patterson:

"How intensely some British people feel about the Simpson affair is shown by the reports of whispers now circulating in some highborn British circles, to the effect that an accident may befall some one if the King doesn't drop Mrs. Simpson, or at least drop all idea of making her his queen. That reminds you not so much of anything in British history as of court intrigues in Czarist Russian history. . . .

"It didn't occasion any loud comments from nobility or clergy when the King yachted to Yugoslavia with Mrs. Simpson. But when it is suspected that he intends to marry the girl, the nobles and the clergy are horrified.

"The feeling of the nobles is that it would weaken the royal and aristocratic tradition, so carefully fostered by the nobility for so many generations, that kings and dukes are a few cuts above the rest of us. That tradition has been repudiated in this country, where many of us feel that the best secret gifts some queens could make to their royal lines would be to be unfaithful occasionally with some husky guardsman, and thus let new blood into the royal family.

"It might as well be said in public, too, that most of the nobles of England feel that no American woman is good enough for the King to marry--just as they feel that it is beneath a British noble's dignity to marry an American girl for any reason except her money. . . .

"As a menace to the British throne, Simpson may rank with [General George] Washington."

*According to its constitution, the Mothers Union exists, under the patronage of Queen Mary, "to hold the sanctity of marriage and to awaken in mothers of all classes a sense of their great responsibility in training their boys and girls. To organize in every place a band of mothers who will unite in prayer and seek by their own example to lead their own families in purity and holiness." *Persons who banned the Simpson story and made no bones about so doing last week were King Carol in Rumania, the Yugoslavian Regency, Tsar Boris in Bulgaria and Director Sam Wood of the Four Marx Brothers. ''Mrs. Simpson is associated with a figure beloved by the American people," said cautious Director Wood in Hollywood. "It would be professional suicide," continued Mr. Wood, "for a comedian to make a national hero the subject of any joke." /-The kneeling figure of a woman much resembling Mrs. Simpson is at the centre of a Department of Justice mural inscribed, "The Sweatshop And Tenement of Yesterday Can Be The Life-Ordered-With-Justice of Tomorrow." A tenement family at a round table is shown in the fresh-fruit-&-after-dinner-coffee stage of the future Life-Ordered-With-Justice. A woman in the right foreground holds a baby in her lap, and toward this with outstretched hands and fingers gropes the kneeling centre-figure of "Mrs. Simpson." *Two telegrams from Mrs. Simpson were delivered to His Majesty in South Wales and after laying down the last of these he ordered a remedy she has previously recommended with success: a tub of hot water in which King Edward soaked his feet for an hour last week, meditatively puffing his pipe in the royal private car.

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