Memory Lane

Carrie Jacobs Bond, sugary sweet, old-time song writer (A Perfect Day, I Love You Truly) was treated to an Sand-birthday party by the ham-&-eggs eating Los Angeles Breakfast Club. White-haired, ailing Mrs. Bond brushed aside the protests of her nurse, made a speech, next day was back in bed. One of ASCAP's top-ranking members (A Perfect Day alone has sold over 8,000,000 copies), she has grown rich on her royalties, still turned out songs until six months ago, when she became a semi-invalid. Her latest is called Because. Said she: "My songs have brought me everything I could want."

Shirley Temple, 16, in Manhattan on a bond-selling tour, revived memories of her youth on her first trip to the city in six years. Said she: "New York looked different then. I think the buildings looked taller, but maybe it's because I was shorter." She teamed up with her oldtime dancing partner Bill ("Bojangles") Robinson to do a shim-sham-shimmy before 50,000 in Central Park. Exclaimed modest Miss Temple: "I haven't done this since I was seven, so excuse me if I'm not so hot." Said Robinson: "Honey, you haven't done this since you were four. So it's going to be sensational."

Out of Nowhere

Raymond Duncan, esthetic brother of the late, free-loving danseuse Isadora Duncan, celebrated the occupation of his adopted Paris by donning his famed pre-war getup, Greek toga and sandals, then marching to the U.S. Embassy with the U.S. flag in hand. He gave the banner to the Swiss caretaker, proceeded to sing Yankee Doodle until he was hoarse.

Georges ("Georgeous Georges") Carpentier, dapper light-heavyweight boxing hero of the '20s and a French air-force veteran of World Wars I & II, was met in Paris by sight-seeing U.S. soldiers who questioned him in schoolboy French, mobbed him when he wisecracked in English: "Why the hell don't you speak your own language? Don't you recognize me?" Carpentier said that his Paris nightclub had been taken over by the Nazis, declared that he had cooperated with the enemy only once, and then under pressure, when he refereed a fight in Berlin. His only question: where was his onetime conqueror, Jack Dempsey --"a grand guy."

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, bald, bespectacled British humorist (Thank You, Jeeves; Quick Service, etc.) captured in France by the Nazis in 1940, was found alive & well in Paris' Hotel Bristol, eager to return to London to dispel the rumors that he had been a Nazi sympathizer.* He called his five broadcasts on the German radio in 1941 "a terrible mistake," explained that he intended them "in the spirit of the British soldier who spoke on the radio to get messages back home." Wodehouse said he was released from prison camp "mainly because I had reached the age of 60," then arranged for the talks describing life in the camps. "I suppose it sounds idiotic," he declared, "but it never occurred to me that it would be held against me. ... I guess all authors must be half-witted."

Gertrude Stein was discovered by CBS Warcaster Eric Sevareid at a chateau in the mountains of southeast France. Over the radio she expressed her feelings: "What a day is today, that is, what a day it was day before yesterday. What a day!" Sevareid reported that the 70-year-old, iron-haired, literary experimentalist was fit but thinner, because she walked seven-and-a-half miles a day for food, chopped wood all winter. She has finished a new book, All Wars I Remember, which Sevareid said "appears to be about the human race always destroying its century. Hitler, it explains, is essentially a 19th-Century creature." Gertrude Stein told him: "This war is far more logical than the last war, and much more interesting." She wanted to go to Paris, but had no thought of returning to the U.S.* Said she: "I was never happier than during the last four years, because I came so close to the French people."

The Duchess of Windsor went to Manhattan's Roosevelt Hospital to have her appendix out. Reports that she engaged a suite of ten rooms, with 18 telephones and six nurses, had to be denied by the hospital. Actually, the Windsors had a room each, one telephone, three nurses.

Colonel John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, peacetime sportsman and president of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, second husband of Betsey Gushing Roosevelt, since June a staff officer of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, went jeeping with four other officers in just-liberated southern France. When a concealed German tank opened fire, the officers took cover in a ditch, then made their way to a farmhouse. There, when the group was finally forced to surrender, Whitney became the Nazis' richest U.S. catch.

* In London, British authorities said no legal charges would be pressed against Wodehouse, announced that facilities for repatriation were based on "physical conditions," with no priority allowed Wodehouse.

*In her own way, Pittsburgh-born Miss Stein is patriotic though expatriate. In 1928, she published A Patriotic Leading: Verse I

Indeed indeed

Can you see.

The stars

And regularly the precious treasure.

What do we love without measure.

We know.

Verse II

We suspect the second man.

Verse HI

We are worthy of everything that happens.

You mean weddings.

Naturally I mean weddings.

Verse IV

And then we arc,

Hail to the nation.

Verse V

Do you think we believe it.

Verse VI

It is that or bust.

Verse VII

We cannot bust.

Verse VIII

Thank you.

Verse IX

Thank you so much.

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