Entertainers

Ethel Waters was drawing record crowds last week to the same nightspot in which she first sang on Broadway 20 years ago (Cafe Zanzibar--then the Plantation Club). On her dressing table the husky, dusky chanteuse propped a framed poem,

Tell God About It. Excerpts:

O workers in the busy throng, Who toil unnoticed all day long, When everything it seems, goes wrong, Tell God About It!

On Him you always can depend, His love for you ne'er has an end, Tell God your only lasting friend, Tell Him About It.

Said Ethel to New York Post Columnist Earl Wilson: "That poem I couldn't go anywhere without. ... I ask Him for so much. I guess I keep Him scufflin'. . . . Oh, darling I used to be the kind of woman, if I was mad at you ... I had a look that was poison ivy. . . . But now ... it's eight, nine years since I asked an eye for an eye. . . ."

Johnny Weissmuller emitted a high-pitched cry: "I've been wearing animal-skin scanties too long. My chest is calloused from beating it, and I've climbed more trees than a lumberjack. My lines have read like a backward two-year-old talking to his nurse." His program of dress reform, in order of his new movie costumes: 1) a Marine combat-correspondent's uniform, 2) a cowboy outfit, 3) a business suit, 4) perhaps, eventually, evening dress.

Herbert Fleishhacker, 71-year-old San Francisco banker, tossed peanuts to the animals in the zoo named after him (where, in 1936, the chimpanzee squirted him with a mouthful of water), suddenly fell into the hippopotamus pool. Fleishhacker landed in nine feet of water, was rescued before he rolled under 2,500 Ib. Puddles.

For the Record

Charles Edison (see cut), ex-Governor of New Jersey, son of the late, great Thomas Alva Edison, was elected national chairman by United China Relief. As head of the fund which in 1943 sent $8,683,870 to war-torn China, onetime Secretary of the Navy Edison succeeds the late Manhattan Lawyer Frederick Hill (Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine &) Wood. Said Edison: "The Chinese people have purchased time for all their allies with space of their country and blood of their people."

Lou Henry (Mrs. Herbert) Hoover, in a letter to her sons Allan and Herbert Jr., disposed of an estate valued "in excess of $10,000." Filed as a will in San Jose, Calif., her letter declared: "... I have a will somewhere. I have not seen it in years. ... So I will replace it with this. . . . You have been lucky boys to have had such a father and I am a lucky woman to have had my life's trail alongside the paths of three such men and boys. ... To your Daddy I bequeath all my interest and rights in the community property acquired by us during our married life. . . . There probably will not be more than enough cash in my bank account and the small securities ... to settle up the small personal affairs which I leave. If any should be left over . . . please divide it equally among your children--likely for pocket money."

Arthur MacArthur, the General's son, turned six in Australia, was photographed on a shopping tour with his mother.

Householders

Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands, escaped unhurt, lost two bodyguards, in a direct bomb hit on the house in which she was staying near London.

Eugene O'Neill revealed that he had sold his spacious, white-walled "Tao House"--across the bay from San Francisco. "I have to go East on business, but this has nothing to do with the theater," said the playwright, who during his seven year seclusion at "Tao House" (with his third wife, exactress Carlotta Monterey) has been struggling against a recurring ailment to complete his cycle of seven plays: A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed. No comment by O'Neill was reported on the news that a child was expected in August by his 18-year-old daughter Oona, dark-eyed fourth wife of recently indicted Charles Chaplin (TIME, Feb. 21).

Paul Whiteman, 313-lb. band leader turned 195-lb., Blue Network musical director, was observed by Manhattan Columnist Lucius Beebe "bolting" from the Blue for the 5:31 train to his Rosemont (NJ.) "Paul Whiteman Walking Horse Farm." There, noted Beebe, Whiteman keeps 150 pipes, 100 suits, 75 pairs of "costly, hand-tooled" town shoes, 24 pairs of riding boots, 15 saddles (one silver-mounted), one dozen staticless radios, enough phonograph records to make the planning of a disk-house no idle talk.

Libby Holman, blues-singing widow of the late tobacco heir Zachary Smith Reynolds, asked the Manhattan trustees of her eleven-year-old son Christopher Smith Reynolds' $7,000,000 estate to release $435,183.57 for the purpose of building him a "suitable and attractive" house.

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