Statesmen

Anthony Eden corrected an aged rumor that he had once been snubbed by Italy's forgotten man: "I never had a row with Mussolini. I found Mussolini unnegotiable, and he still is. . . ."

Henry L Stimson recalled the stricken faces of young officers who met him when he stepped from a plane in Newfoundland: they had heard a rumor that the personage arriving on the plane was Hedy Lamarr.

Entertainers

Orson Welles threw up a tent and some tintype booths on a Los Angeles lot and started a brave one-man revival of prestidigitatorial entertainment, but not at tent-show prices. Service men got in free; the rest paid $11 a seat opening night, a $5.50 top thereafter. For that they got two bewitching hours of the versatile Wonder Boy, dazzlingly costumed, reading minds, hypnotizing his curvilinear assistant, Starlet Mary Rowland, whipping rabbits out of hats and bowls full of rice out of nowhere, sawing ladies in halves, levitating stooges, and triumphantly producing Rita Hayworth from a trunk.

Bette Davis sued the New York Central and the Pullman Co. for $2,000, charged they had lost a trunkful of her clothes in or around Chicago.

Harold Lloyd, the Hairbreadth Harry of the silent comics, had a hairbreadth escape when prints of his early films, which he valued at $2 million, went up in explosive fire in his private film vault. Overcome by the fumes, the comedian collapsed at the vault's door, was dragged to safety by his wife, Silent Star Mildred Davis.

Correspondents

Maude Phelps Hutchins, sculptress wife of the University of Chicago's president, had a life-size male nude all ready for casting in bronze, but no bronze. She wrote to WPB's Donald Nelson, asking how about letting her have some idle bronze on loan, if she promised to give it back the moment it was needed? The reply she got from Washington, "apparently written by one of Mr. Nelson's secretaries," counseled patience and looked forward to the postwar world. She wrote again, got more advice. Her young man of plaster (with hands held determinedly behind him), she decided, should be titled: The New Deal.

Lafcadio Hearn was the subject of a lively controversy in New Orleans. The papers were full of shocked, incredulous, hat-tearing letters to the editor. Once a New Orleans Jack-of-all-journalism, the late Lafcadio, master of delicate lyrical prose, had won his greatest fame as a writer on Japan. He had become a Japanese citizen, taken the name Yakumo Koizumi and a Japanese wife, begot three sons and a daughter. More than one letter last week suggested that his sons might now be killing American soldiers.* People got so excited because the Maritime Commission named a New Orleans-built Liberty ship the Lafcadio Hearn.

Warriors

Major General Basilic Jose Valdes,

Chief of Staff of the Philippine Army and Minister of Defense, was boning up at Oklahoma's Fort Sill (artillery) for a fighting return home.

Naval Reserve Lieut. Eddy Duchin, peacetime bandleader and silk-smooth jazz pianist, was made an antisub warfare officer aboard a vessel of the destroyer escort fleet. One of his jobs: analyzing the unmusical notes produced by a subdetector.

Roger ("The Terrible") Touhy, old-time Chicago gangster now serving a 99-year prison sentence for kidnapping, got an injunction temporarily forbidding the exhibition of Hollywood's Roger Touhy, Gangster, on grounds that it was "immoral, obscene, and prejudicial" to his family. Three days later a Chicago judge lifted the ban on the ground that Touhy had not charged misrepresentation of his character.

Vittorio (Son-of-Benito) Mussolini submitted his resignation as president of the European Professional Boxing Association.

* The sons would be 50, 46 and 43.

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