Hearts & Thistles

Romance of the week broke in tiny Plymouth, Ohio, where Millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney, 42, married the village doctor's daughter, pretty Eleanor Searle, 32. Surprised as anybody was The New Yorker, whose Whitney profile appeared next day with not a mention of the bride. When they met in 1937 she was a receptionist at Pan American Airways, he the polo-playing, twice married chairman of the board. She had come to Manhattan some seven years before to study singing as the protegee of aged Impresario Dan Frohman, who hailed from nearby Sandusky. In last week's wedding publicity she was headlined as a singer. She sang briefly in 1939 with the St. Louis Municipal Opera, has yet to make the Metropolitan, where Whitney is a board director. Lately she has sung in churches, occasionally in concert and on the radio with the Madrigal Singers.

Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, 20, perennial Glamor Girl No. 1, finally decided to wed her longtime escort, socialite Insuranceman John Sims ("Shipwreck") Kelly, 31, onetime pro football player. Brenda, whose allowance has been $1,000 a week, said they would live on Ship's insurance commissions, at least until she comes into her $3,500,000 next year. He gave her a diamond-paved cabochon emerald ring. She said they would live obscurely. Dancers Tony and Renee de Marco seemed split for good when Renee left Manhattan last week, bound for "Florida ... or Reno." Maritally separated since 1938, they danced together until a few weeks ago. Now Veteran Tony, 41, has a new dancing partner, Sally Craven, whom he describes as "the kind of girl you want to . . . cuddle." Maria Farkas asked a California court to set aside the divorce she got from Director Alexander Korda twelve years ago. Korda married Merle Oberon nine years later, is still married to her. His ex-wife stated she really didn't want the divorce, went right on living with Korda till just before he wed Miss Oberon. Victor Mature, 26, Gertrude Lawrence's dream-Adonis in Lady in the Dark, married Martha Stephenson Kemp, 22-year-old widow of Band Leader Hal Kemp, who was killed in an auto crash last December. Hillbilly Canary Judy Canova, 24, married Corporal James H. Ripley in Honolulu. Two days later she Clippered back to Hollywood, after the groom had been tossed in the guardhouse for going A.W.O.L. to wed her.

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"I come to New York for stimulation," said Poet Katherine Biddle, wife of the U.S. Solicitor General. "Washington has such a sleepy climate. It's hard to work there. I wonder that the Government people get anything done."

Axis Relations

Archduke Otto of Austria received guests in Hollywood, seated on a golden throne at last--a prop one borrowed from the M.G.M. warehouse. Ex-Bundfuehrer Fritz Kuhn, now convict 26558, was refused a parole at Dannemora, where he is serving two and one-half to five years for stealing Bund funds. Despite good behavior, the board decided he was "a hazard, to the public peace." Red-haired Annelise Thomsen, wife of the Nazi Charge d'Affaires in Washington, denied she would refuse to return to Germany with him, called contrary rumors "insane . . . nonsense." Said she: "I may have jokingly said I wanted another season of foxhunting here in America"; but she denied ever remarking that the Nazis came from, and would return to, the gutter. Meantime in Manhattan American-born Cecil White, wife of Gaetano Vecchiotti, Italian Consul General, looked forward to expulsion with pleasure, singsonged: "I'm glad to go, I'm glad to go; we haven't been treated very well here, you know."

Youth

Eleanor Roosevelt readied the sprawling Roosevelt summer home at Campobello Island, N.B., for 30 college boys and girls who will use the place for six weeks this summer to study discussion-group-leading. They are sponsored by the safe & sound International Student Service, to which she has transferred the affections once lavished on the deep pink American Youth Congress. << Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia, riled by rumors of a race-equality move in State education, settled down to weeding out non-Georgian teachers, declared: "I never did think these foreign professors were smarter than our own Georgians." << King Peter II of Yugoslavia, 17, reached London safely, prepared to establish his Government-in-Exile there. << John L Lewis Jr. graduated from not-so-laborite Princeton. The labor leader brought his cigar along and watched. << George Weyerhaeuser, famed kidnap victim of 1935, now 15, graduated from a Tacoma, Wash, junior high school. << Joseph P. Kennedy's second-youngest daughter, Patricia, 17, was chosen to bottle-whack the S.S. President Polk, last of the American President Lines' new series of combination freight-and-passenger vessels.

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Every so often Steel Tycoon Charles M. Schwab, late, great, bankrupt (TIME, May 26), used to promise a $2,000,000 endowment to his alma mater, St. Francis College in Loretto, Pa. Last week the college revealed that Schwab had left it holding not an endowment but the bag, to the tune of $25,000 he borrowed in 1932 and never repaid.

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