Parents

Inconspicuously in the letter column of the New York World-Telegram appeared last week a letter from Red Cross recreation worker Ethel Gross Hopkins.*She had sent carbon copies to many a newspaper. The letter:

"Notification has just come to me that Stephen, my youngest son, aged 18, a private first :lass in the United States Marine Corps, was killed in action. I have come to New York hoping to receive fuller details regarding the circumstances of my son's death, which occurred so soon after I received his APO number and notice of his reaching his destination overseas.

"I am writing to you in order to call your attention to the fact that Stephen, Robert, and David are my three sons as well as the sons of Harry L. Hopkins, confidential adviser to President Roosevelt. In all your news items and stories you either completely omit this fact or state it incorrectly.

"It has been my joy and privilege to bring up my three sons -to plan for their well-being and their education, and I wish to be identified with them.

"They all volunteered for the services when the time came. David is a senior lieutenant in the Navy, on an aircraft carrier; Robert is a sergeant in the Army Signal Corps in Italy and Stephen, who

Has made the sacrifice, was private first class in the Marine Corps."

Charles Chaplin by his long-awaited blood test proved that he could not have been the father of Joan Berry's four-months-old daughter. Miss Berry went into hysterics. Said her lawyer, John J. Irwin: "I believed all along that my client was telling the truth." Next day he suggested that Chaplin might have tampered with his blood. Experts immediately declared such a dodge impossible. Lawyer Irwin resigned. U.S. Attorney Carr continued his prosecution of Chaplin. Asked whether Joan might have to go to work now that she was cut off from Chaplin support, her mother answered: "It could be."

At week's end, 18-year-old Oona O'Neill Chaplin, the 54-year-old comedian's fourth wife, said she expected a baby in mid-August: "I hope this news will stop a lot of those silly rumors that are going around. If the baby is a boy we'll name him Lee, I guess. I don't know what it'll be if it's a girl, but it won't be Oona."

Needles

Gertrude Stein's new heroine (Mrs. Reynolds), who will not appear in the bookstores until after the war, was described by her creator as "very well-born." In New Yorker quotations from the manuscript, smuggled out of France by a Stein friend in "the front of her dress," Author Stein explained her heroine's good birth: "She was born on Tuesday and the next day was Wednesday and she was a day old on Wednesday." The novel ("more about Tuesdays than about roses") includes characters Hitler, Stalin, and Angel Harper. "When a little dog sticks himself on a needle on the floor he cries right away. When a little child falls down he does not cry till he is picked up. This has a great deal to do with Angel Harper."

Eddie Condon, hot guitarist and impresario of Manhattan's vigorous Town Hall jazz concerts, had things to say about "semipro" jazz critics: ". . . You know, the kind that call a clarinet a licorice stick. . . . Stuff like that sets you back ten years when you're trying to sell people jazz."

Soldiers

William Patrick Hitler, tall, mustached nephew of Adolf, who has just passed his physical in Manhattan, said he was "raring to go" into the U.S. Navy. Said he: "All the time I was in Germany I had to run to Hess or Hitler for anything I wanted." Charles MacArthur, Helen Hayes's playwright-husband turned U.S. Army Major, who first attracted her by offering her peanuts with a heartfelt wish that they "were emeralds." sent her an envelopeful of emeralds from Burma. Wrote Mac-Arthur: "I wish they were peanuts." Major William McChesney Martin Jr., the New York Stock Exchange's be spectacled, 37-year-old ex-president, one time draftee, was promoted to lieutenant colonel -two years and ten months after he was drafted as a private.

*First wife of Harry Hopkins, whom she divorced in 1930, and mother of his three sons. His second wife, Barbara Duncan Hopkins, mother of twelve-year-old Diana, died in 1937. His present wife is Louise Macy Hopkins, onetime fashion editor, whom he married in 1942.

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