In her Riviera castle near Cannes, sultry, Cinevamp Pola Negri, 41, who quit German films in 1938 and denied that Adolf Hitler was her friend, complained that the straitened fare of Vichy's France had cost her 18 lb. Tenor Enrico Caruso's American-born widow, Mrs. Dorothy Benjamin Caruso Ingram Holder, who lives near by, reported that since the armistice she had lost 22 lb. -- Ordered to report April 16 (a month earlier than expected) for his year's military service was bespectacled, Sabbath-observing, unmarried William McChesney Martin Jr., 34, $48,000-a-year president of the New York Stock Exchange. -- After doing her best to save civilization at Geneva, pale, implacable Alice Paul, founder, chairman and planetary lobbyist of the World Women's Party for Equal Rights, landed in New York City, announced: "Men are to blame for the present war." -- Straw-haired British Acrobat Jimmy Mollison, who made the first solo flight westward over the north Atlantic in 1932, landed at Halifax to help ferry U.S.-built bombers back to Britain. -- Readers of one of the longest columns in the U.S. press (In the News) have been marveling for a month at William Randolph Hearst's repeated encomiums for Mexico as she now is. Last week, back in high good humor from his first trip below the Rio Grande since Mexico's Government expropriated a lot of foreign property, Mexican Ranch Owner Hearst, who said not one public word against the collectivist Cardenas regime and thus came through into the sunnier Avila Camacho regime with the loss of only 18,000 of his million-plus acres, declared: "They were pretty decent about that. They didn't take any more than was right. After all it is their country." -- The Millville, N.J. Board of Trade banqueted well-paunched Defense Commissioner Leon Henderson, elected him, as a native son, No. 1 Citizen for 1940 of Millville (pop.: 14,705). -- Day after he had married 34-year-old Amelia Orr Ronin in Ensenada, Mexico, Thomas Fortune Ryan II, scion of the banking and mining empire, awoke and found that his third bride had vanished. He proceeded to Los Angeles, took a bridal suite, waited two days before the bride returned. Groaned veteran Playboy Tommy: "I don't know when the honeymoon ended, but it's over. You never can tell what a redhead will do. But she's coming up here tomorrow. Or maybe we'll get together in a month. How do I know?" -- Emerging from the gallery during practice for the Masters golf tournament at Augusta. Ga., fiery old Ty Cobb stepped to the tee, rifled a 250-yd. lefthander straight down the middle. Almost as pleased as if he had just stolen second, he then issued a challenge to Babe Ruth, who hits a long ball at golf, too: "I have been hankering to take a shot at the Babe ever since I started playing golf. Anywhere, any time, and for any charity." -- Having read Novelist John P. Marquand's best-selling H. M. Pulham, Esquire, which pokes chuckle-humored satire at a Beacon Hill Boston now all but dead, William Cardinal O'Connell, Archbishop of Boston, complained: "Of course my experience is limited, but I sincerely hope that Bostonians, especially the women, have not degenerated into the type he describes." A few days later the City Council declared that Author Marquand's novel "assails the character of Boston womanhood," called upon the police to ban it. -- When U.S. women for the ninth year opened their newspapers to learn what Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt was wearing for Easter, they read with distress that she had forgotten what it was, except that the hat was "non-standardized." Last week the question was answered. In Manhattan Mrs. Roosevelt emerged from a final fitting at Arnold Constable's in a staid ensemble of neon purple and violet, a purple hat (see cut). -- Soon after dimpled, 35-year-old Tobacco Scion Richard Joshua Reynolds Jr. lent Democratic campaign committees some $300,000 last year, he found himself treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. Last week Neophyte Reynolds' political career advanced another step when fellow North Carolinians put him up for mayor of Winston-Salem. -- As London's famed, 300-acre Royal Botanic Gardens at Suburban Kew celebrated its centenary with unabated activity and attendance, doughty old Director Sir Arthur Hill chortled: "Hitler's bombs have failed to do as much damage as the disastrous hailstorm of 1879," announced that against the day when Hitler might ruin Kew's gardens with gas, he had provided gas masks for his rare orchids.

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