Monday, Aug. 18, 1941
In a tabloid snob-gossip's dream week, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, 28, the country's best-known young multimillionaire sportsman, was sued for divorce in New York by Manuela Hudson Vanderbilt (charges: adultery with two corespondents). Said Alfred's mother, Mrs. Margaret Emerson, who has been married four times: "I wouldn't give much for him if he didn't. After all, he's a normal young man and he has been separated from his wife for eight months. He wouldn't be a son of mine if he stopped living." Wept crocodile Hearstling Cholly Knickerbock er: "What a pity that we are to be treated to the ugly spectacle of another Vanderbilt divorce in times such as these." No weeper, Mother Margaret talked on & on to reporters about "life" (sex): "If you've stopped loving a person, you have, and that's all there is to it. There's no explanation for it. But, although it happens every day, people always are upset. They can't be realistic. They haven't the courage to admit it, call it off, then go on with their lives." -t -- Sixty-nine-year-old Lady Decies, bejeweled grand dame of the international set, announced at starchy Newport (the scene of many of her fabulous social antics 30 years ago) that 74-year-old John Graham Hope De la Poer Beresford, Baron Decies, was suing her for divorce on grounds of desertion. Once she was the wife of chilly Henry Symes Lehr, Society's top fop and unofficial Newport jester, whom she delicately peeled in her book "King Lehr" and the Gilded Age. She wrote that she had never been happy with him; of her present husband, once remarked: "I married Decies so I could attend the coronation." -- -- To the New York World-Telegram said Novelist John Steinbeck's wife, Carol, currently separated from the author: "I suppose every married couple faces a situation like this. Most women would go to Reno and call it a day. I want to see it through. . . . If we wait perhaps John and I will be all the better and finer for it. ... There won't be the blind devotion, the dumb trust, but there will be a new understanding. . . . This is something all men go through. . . . This isn't a break. . . . I've submerged myself for John Steinbeck. I became part of him. I wrote verse. I put it aside. Nothing mattered but John. . . ." / / Composer Walter Joseph Donaldson, who sang of domestic bliss in My Blue Heaven, sued Dorothy Ann Donaldson for divorce. She countered with a suit for separate maintenance of $175 a week, / / Minsky Stripper Rose La Rose sued for a divorce from J. Harrington Price, retired toy manufacturer. She told New York Sunday News reporters that after a hard day's work she had to put on an extra show at home while Price played his mouth organ. "In the theater I have my audience and am inspired," she said. "There was no inspiration performing for an audience of one. ... I would be crying, but all he would say was: 'Take it off! Take it off!' ': Of Price's harmonica style she declared: "It stifled me." --/ As Colonel Hubert Fauntleroy ("Black Eagle") Julian, Negro flier-of-fortune, waved good-by to his wife Essie in front of her Harlem apartment, a process server thrust into his surprised hand papers notifying him of her suit against him for separation. She asked $30 a week support. Julian told a reporter he was willing to give her more.
Song & Dance
When the "Tree of Hope" (supposed to provide an immediate job for any actor who touched it) was knocked down on a Harlem street corner where it grew, Tap Dancer Bill Robinson joined the frantic crowd that tore it to splinters; trying to save it, he salvaged two chunky hunks. / / Dated to sing this week at a ball at wealthy Mrs. Herbert Shipman's plushy villa in Newport is her new neighbor, Gertrude Niesen, chatelaine of the Oelrichs mansion. / / Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, 24 and twice a father, won his appeal to Washington for draft deferment as a family man. / / When the chorus of Cincinnati Summer Opera Association, claiming $400 for overtime rehearsals, walked out just before the curtain rose, the management hastily invoked arbitration and put the disputed money in escrow. The stakeholder: Gladys Swarthout, who went on as Carmen with the money in her bosom.
Fortunes of War
While a German plane rocked a merchantman with bombs, Britain's only seagoing woman engineer ran the engine room singlehanded, haloed with escaping steam and showered with black fuel oil. So George VI presented the Most. Excellent Order of the British Empire to gaunt, nerveless Victoria Drummond, 42. a British Fascist Oswald Mosley, interned in London's Brixton Prison, began taking German lessons. / / Antanas Smefona, self-exiled President of Lithuania, discovered living with his wife in a log cabin near Benton Harbor, Mich., is still ecstatic over America's good roads and standard of living. / / Private Hank Greenberg shone in close order drill and calisthenics, won a promotion to corporal. / / Soviet Composer Dmitri Shostakovich (Lady Macbeth of Mzensk) went to work in Leningrad as a fire fighter. / / The public library of Southport, England, threw out 90 books by P. G. Wodehouse, termed them "waste paper." / / Wandering Ex-King Carol of Rumania showed signs of settling down: he bought two automobiles, leased for three months a residence in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacan, was reported to have deposited a tidy $7,000,000 in a Mexican bank.
Hollywood
Veteran Shirley Temple, 12, neither blonde nor chubby any more, came out of her 14-month retirement to go to work on the first of four pictures, at a salary of $50,000 a picture. Said she, "A wonderful vacation ... no school or anything--just fun, like it used to be." / / Veteran Slinker Marlene Dietrich accepted a mother role. / / William Saroyan offered the film rights of The Time of Your Life free to any studio that would contribute "every penny of the proceeds" to national defense. / / Canyon-mouthed Martha Raye swerved her car to avoid another, ran off the road and chuted 150 feet down into a canyon, sprained an ankle.
Out of Sing Sing and into a waiting limousine popped Richard Whitney, paroled after three years, four months of prison for grand larceny when his brokerage firm failed. His luggage: a Gladstone bag, a wicker hamper, a cardboard box, two sacks holding miscellaneous belongings. In his jeans: a check for $183, most of it his earnings at 15-c- a day as clerk in the Keeper's office. Immediate prospect: stewardship of 25 cows on a Cape Cod farm. The rules: don't change jobs without permission; keep regular hours; stay away from firearms, liquor, convicts, Wall Street.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.