Troubled

The Duke of Argyll, 72-year-old, 20-titled, elf-seeing, Gaelic-speaking laird of Inveraray, Scotland, received in absentia a court admonition (public reproof carrying no fine or sentence). The trouble started when 79-year-old Town Clerk Robert Sutherland Corrigall stopped by with some Department of Health recommendations for cleaning up the ducal estate. His crusty Lordship listened carefully, politely shook hands, then gave his caller a good caning followed by an offer to throw him in nearby Loch Fyne. The Duke refused to appear in court, sent word that, after seven weeks of reflection, he had apologized.

Ernest Hemingway, sporting a lush bush, was nightclub-sitting with Fellow Author John Steinbeck, who has just started to become a beaver, when (reported New York Post Columnist Leonard Lyons) they were asked: "Why the beards?" Steinbeck: "Obviously, an affectation." Hemingway: "Obviously, to cover a rash."

Dorothy Lamour and her husband, Army Air Forces Captain William Ross Howard III, entered their cottage at Arrowhead Springs Hotel, heard a rustle in the wastebasket, investigated. Announced Captain Howard: "It's a cat." He overturned the basket, said: "Scat!" The skunk scatted. So did the Howards.

John S. Sumner, mild-mannered successor to the late, rabid Anthony Corn-stock as secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, blew off a bit of steam after reading D. H. Lawrence's The First Lady Chatterley* (TIME, March 27). He discovered "obscene" passages on 92 pages of the book, prodded police to seize the 398 copies in its publisher's stockroom. Said Dial Press Publisher George W. Joel: Not one of "approximately sixty reviews . . . mentioned any obscenity. As a matter of fact, we consider it very tame."

Pleased

Victor Mature, Hollywood handsome who is now a chief bosun's mate, arrived in Manhattan with a Coast Guard musical show, Tars and Spars. Long known as a "beautiful hunk of man," he was pleased to report that "the Coast Guard fellows changed it to 'beautiful hunk of junk.' "

Bruce Barton, advertising tycoon, onetime G.O.P. Congressman, ranged himself alongside the Sheriff of Nottingham. In a speech before some 370 be-orchided New Jersey socialites, he found a new name for Franklin Roosevelt. Said he: the New Deal's "morals have never risen above the level of Robin Hood, who defended his thefts from the rich on the ground that he gave to the poor."

Changed

Frederic Francois Chopin, Polish pianist-composer (of French-Polish parents) was Germanized by the same Nazis who have banned his music in occupied Poland since 1939. Chopin, they announced, was "of course German," a descendant of an old Alsatian family named Schopping.

Lou Gehrig's parents, 77-year-old German-born Henry and 62-year-old Danish-born Christine, after more than 40 years' residence in the U.S., took the oath of citizenship.

Named

Paulette Goddard, well-gammed gamin of the cinema, was back in Manhattan from an eleven-week, 38,000-mile U.S.O. Camp Show tour. In the CBI (China-Burma-India) war theater, where she was the first U.S. woman entertainer, Paulette had a narrow escape: at the jump-off field in Burma the weather looked dirty, so the pilot who had won in a lottery (TIME, March 13) the right to take her over the Hump decided to wait; that night another plane crashed in the Himalayas. Tabbed "Madame Cheesecake" by the G.I.s, she was given a scroll by vinegary Lieut. General Joe Stilwell which identified her as a Dead End Kid (because she went to the end of the line). In Burma and China, Pioneer Paulette rode many an extra jeep mile to get to plumbing, often brushed her teeth with canned grapefruit juice, washed her underwear in a helmet, herself in leftover tea.

Irina Baronova, popular White Russian pin-up girl of the Red Army, ballerina of the Manhattan musical Follow the Girls, had a new narcissus named for her by the Horticultural Society of New York.

Mordecai ("Three-fingered") Brown, famed Chicago Cub pitcher of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance days, who pitched against "Christy" Mathewson 24 times and beat him 13, won the Republican nomination for state representative in Terre Haute, Ind.

Honored

Major James Stewart, tall, gangling cinemactor, whose commercial pilot's rating made him an Air Forces natural once he put on enough weight to meet Army standards, received the Distinguished Flying Cross--for his leadership in the Feb. 20 raid on aircraft factories at Brunswick (20 U.S. planes lost). Previous decorations: the Air Medal and Oak Leaf Cluster. As an Eighth Air Force squadron commander, he was the pilot-leader of 20-odd B-24 bombers on eleven missions over Germany, is now operations officer for his station's 50 to too Liberators.

Eddie Cantor, who has been rolling his banjo eyes (see p. 54) at wounded servicemen on the "Purple Heart Circuit" for three months, was awarded a Purple Heart scroll at a testimonial dinner marking his 35th anniversary in show business.

Sergeant Joe Louis Barrow, in Eng land on a camp-tour of exhibition boxing matches, had his mahogany-carved features measured for wax by London's Bernard Tussaud, of the great French wax-figure family.

Frances Perkins won the booby prize in a poll conducted by Look. Fifty-two newspaper correspondents picked the ten most and ten least useful officials in Washington, gave Madam Secretary the top spot on the "least useful" list. On the positive side they chose: General George C. Marshall (on the lists of 44 correspondents); Cordell Hull (on 33); Franklin Roosevelt (on only 32, but leading more lists -- 24 -- than anyone else).

* In the early '30s a later version of Lady Chatterley, with all the blanks in the four-letter words filled out, was published in Italy, banned in the U.S. and England. Alfred Knopf promptly published an expurgated, practically pointless version.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.