"Dearest Deanna"

Lots of people write nice letters to eye-some, earsome, young Cinemactress Deanna Durbin, some of them pretty big shots too. But last week she got fan mail from the biggest shot south of Berchtesgaden. Benito Mussolini's own Popolo d'Italia wrote and published a tender little note to her:

"Dearest Deanna:

"In the past we always had a soft place in our heart for you. However, today we fear that you, like the remainder of American youth, are controlled by the President, and perhaps tomorrow will see fine American youth marching into battle in defense of Britain.

"If this is so, you don't yet know how hard life will be for the youth of tomorrow. Why doesn't American youth break the chains which are blindly dragging the entire nation into a war in which it will be defeated?

"To be able to gnaw the Axis, steeltough jaws are necessary and not rosy ones used to chewing gum. If you only knew how good and beautiful are the children of Rome and Berlin and how much poetry there is in the youth of Europe, then you wouldn't listen to your and our enemies."

This touching appeal evoked a harrumph from the New York Times, which sat right down and wrote Deanna a letter too:

"They like you in Italy, Deanna. Italian youth and their elders liked you so much that they could not be coerced to look at a homemade picture so long as you, or any American glamor girl for that matter, were permitted to be shown in an Italian theater.

"If you should answer [the Duce's] billet-doux, Deanna, you might ask him why he's more tender of American than of his own youth. . . . What leader started the business of war for the young anyway?"

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