Not-So-Poor Butterfly

Back from the dead in the great romantic tradition last week came China's glamorous black-banged Butterfly Wu, the fragile cinemactress but durable adventuress, who was supposedly killed by flying shrapnel in the siege of Hong Kong last January. Wu-wooers were relieved: they had feared that a fabulously Asiatic career had ended. The Butterfly's beauty and talent had moved her on & up 1) from the studio of a maker of obscene postcards, 2) to the arms of Henry Pu-yi, stooge ruler of Manchukuo, 3) to the arms of Marshal Chang Hsueeh-liang, onetime overlord of Manchuria. 4) to the position of No. 1 cinestar in China, 5) to Episcopalian marriage to wealthy Christian Vintner Eugene Penn of Shanghai.

But Butterfly Wu now turned up safe & sound in Shiukwang, with Husband Penn, 20 relatives and friends, and a Wulu of an explanation. She had escaped Hong Kong, she said, by disguising herself and Penn as untouchable dirty beggars, and then leading eight children pitifully past the sentries. The Japs failed to examine her husband's baggage, she said; it held the family jewels, her gowns and theatrical makeup. (How the relatives got out was unexplained.) At the time she was reported dead, said Butterfly, she was actually head of a Hong Kong "Women's Club" set up by the Japs. "But that was only to fool the Japs," said she. "My loyalty to our country cannot be questioned, and I am going to show it hereafter by actions instead of words."

Meantime in Manhattan another Chinese, American-born Emily Lee Shek, showed her loyalty by topping off a special weight-making diet with two gallons of water. Thus weighing 101 lb., she became the first Chinese member of the WAACs.

In San Francisco pretty Alice Wong, a bride of three months, looked in her hope chest. She had always wanted an elaborate wedding, but her husband, a shipyard worker and a patriot, had used the money to buy war bonds. Alice Wong laid the bonds aside, stared at the pretty things in the chest. Presently she drank poison and so died.

High Life

Princess Olga, put out of Yugoslavia in 1941 with her Naziphile husband Prince Paul, turned up in England from gamy Kenya Colony for a visit with her sister, the recently widowed Duchess of Kent. Paul stayed home, by request. Gypsy Rose Lee, stripteuse turned woman of letters, was busily writing a musi-comedy about a stripteuse turned woman of letters. Sir Yeshwant Rao Holkar, the fabulously wealthy, pleasure-loving Maharaja of Indore, was reported en route to the U.S. for "urgent medical attention." His U.S.-born ex-nurse and second wife, the former Marguerite Lawler Branyen, has been in the U.S. for kidney doctoring since May. Heiress Gloria ("Mimi") Baker Topping, pre-Brenda glamor deb, young mother of two, went off to Palm Beach to get a divorce from the tin-plate heir, Lieut. Henry J. ("Bob") Topping of the Naval Air Force. Dramatically handsome, wild-haired Blanche Oelrichs Thomas Barrymore Tweed (Poetess"Michael Strange"), second wife of the late John Barrymore, mother of Diana, said she would shortly divorce Socialite Lawyer Harrison Tweed, after 13 years. The marriage outlasted the late Arthur Brisbane's guess, who figured its life expectancy at ten years, bet $10,000 on it. Mrs. Mary Le Grand Jacob, widow of British Major General Arthur Le Grand Jacob, sister-in-law of Field Marshal Sir Claud Jacob, onetime Commander in Chief of the Indian Army, was fined -L-5 in Kingston, England, for "pretending to tell fortunes."

War Effort

King George cut down on fuel and light in Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle by: 1) limiting bathers to five inches of water in the tub (red and black warning lines were painted at the five-inch levels); 2) allowing only one light bulb to a bedroom; 3) forbidding the use of fireplaces in bedrooms except on doctors' orders. Shape-famed Rita Hayworth, ten pounds lighter after a high-gear tour of Army camps for the U.S.O., went into a Hollywood hospital with a physical breakdown. At the Army's air school at Miami Beach, Officer Candidate Clark Gable won the upperclassman's privilege of going to the movies. Mrs. Anne S. Leaver, 37-year-old sister of Major General Carl Spaatz, commander of the U.S. Air Force in Britain, enlisted in the WAACs as an auxiliary (same as private) in Philadelphia. Veteran News-photographer James H. ("Jimmy") Hare offered to the first U.S. flyer to bomb the Imperial Palace in Tokyo a "gold" medal the Mikado had once given him (it turned out to be brass.)

Literary Division: On his farm near Havana, Ernest Hemingway told a reporter who asked him about the war that he was going to get into it himself, left unsaid how, when & where. Said the 44-year-old World War I veteran: "I am and always have been a soldier. For that reason, I prefer action to talking about the war. . . . I'll talk about that when I get back from it, if I come out alive from this struggle for the liberty and dignity of man." For a statement attacking the British, hulking U.S. Novelist Theodore Dreiser was forbidden by Justice Minister Louis St. Laurent to make speeches (or public statements anywhere) in Canada. Dreiser had said: If Russia were defeated, he hoped the Germans would invade England--he would rather see them there than the "aristocratic, horse-riding snobs" who run the country; Churchill has no intention of opening a second front, "does nothing except send thousands of Canadians to be slaughtered at Dieppe." Ex-Editor Ralph McAllister Ingersoll (PM), inducted in July, shortly promoted to staff sergeant, was promoted to 1st lieutenant. Gaunt, haggard Thriller-Diller Samuel Dashiell Hammett (The. Thin Man), a sergeant in World War I, enlisted as a private, went off to Camp Upton.

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