Flush

Evalyn Walsh (Hope Diamond) McLean, famed thrower of famed Washington parties, bought a new District of Columbia estate for a rumored $150,000, began moving her things from "Friendship," which she has sold to the U.S. for a housing project. Said she: "I shall . . . keep on ... with the same old parties and the same old friends." She bought her new diggings, complete with elaborate formal gardens, outsize ballroom, marble-floored billiard room, and swimming pool from Alexander Kirk, U.S. Minister to Egypt.

Mrs. James Laurens ("Daisy") Van Alen, goldplated, blue-haired blue-blood of Newport, engaged a bomb-shelter expert to build a subterranean luxury shelter on her estate with all the comforts of home, air conditioning, special lighting effects, a tunnel to the mansion. She also laid in an eight-year supply of cosmetics.

Henry Junkins ("Bob") Topping, tin-plate heir and ensign in the Naval air service, bought himself $1,000 worth of custom-tailored uniforms, eight pairs of $50 shoes.

Musicians & Muggers

Jose Iturbi, 46, pianist-conductor, private pilot, enlisted in OCD's Civil Air Patrol, to help do ferrying work, eagle-eye the coast. Spanish-born Iturbi took out his first U.S. citizenship papers last August.

Fritz Kreisler did his first professional playing since he was injured in traffic last April: a recording in a Philadelphia studio.

Jack Oakie drew a $500 fine, a 60-day suspension of his driving license and three years' probation for drunken driving in Los Angeles.

Glenn Miller was fined $10 and costs in Englewood, N.J. for driving with out-of-date Kansas license plates.

Chico ("Ravelli") Marx opened with a band in a Brooklyn vaudeville theater, observed: "I'm just where I started 30 years ago, pounding the piano keys."

Diana Barrymore, cinecontract in hand, made her first trip to Hollywood, rejoined Father John, who gloated: "At last my daughter can support me."

Gary Cooper, righthanded, found he had to learn ball-throwing all over again to play the part of the late, great southpaw Lou Gehrig. Ex-major league star Lefty O'Doul coached him.

Ex-Secretary of War Patrick Jay Hurley jumped from Reserve colonel to brigadier general by nomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt. His assignment was not immediately revealed, but the White House said he would not be a line officer.

Sick List

Edsel Ford, 48, was operated on in Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital for a stomach ulcer. His condition was reported "satisfactory."

Leon Blum, 69-year-old ex-Premier of France, who is due to be tried on Feb. 19 on charges of war unpreparedness, fell gravely ill at Bourrassol Manor, France, of phlebitis (vein inflammation).

Wallace Beery, now a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, turned up at Johns Hopkins Hospital for a general examination. Physicians said he would be released soon "unless something more serious develops."

Harry L. Hopkins went back to the Naval Hospital in Washington for another checkup.

Hits & Misses

Marion Davies, great & good friend of William Randolph Hearst, gave the Marion Davies Foundation hospital in Los Angeles to the California State Guard, was appointed a captain in the guard by Governor Culbert Levy Olson. The Hearst papers have dropped their anti-Olsonism.

Emperor Hirohito's likeness was a popular pitching target at a Liberty Fair in Buenos Aires till police stopped the show as a violation of neutrality.

Tallulah Bankhead offered her blood for her country. "I told them that I was so damned anemic," she reported, "my blood would kill a good American soldier. I told them that I'd give them quarts of the stuff if they would put it into the right places--into Japanese soldiers. That would be more effective than a tank."

Dorothy Lamour was refused entrance to the Glenn L. Martin plane plant at Middle River, Md., on the ground that a slow-up for ogling and neck-craning "might cost us half a bomber."

"Wives of Great Men"

Helen Wishart Nelson, wife of War Production Boss Donald, said she was going to do her bit for her husband by keeping on staying at home in suburban Chicago, where she has remained since he went to Washington a year and a half ago. "If I move there," she said, "social functions will rob him of his precious time. . . ." She called herself "War Defense Orphan No. 1."

Edith Willkie, wife of Wendell, went home from Manhattan to Rushville to be with her ailing mother.

Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of Franklin, said she had been watching office girls wobbling on their high heels, suggested: "We might prevent a considerable number of accidents if we could change the things girls long for."

Martyr's Return

Fred Erwin Beal, leader in the bloody Gastonia textile strike of 1929, turned up in Manhattan to take a mill job, swore he was finished with Stalinism. He was fresh from a North Carolina prison, on parole after serving four years of a 17-to-20-year sentence for conspiracy in the murder of Gastonia's police chief. Ex-Communist Beal, who has always maintained his innocence, said of his imprisonment: "I just look on it as something you have to do in the labor movement sometimes. . . . Unfortunate, but that's the way it is." Once publicized as a labor martyr, he said he wanted only to get back to work.

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