Bette Davis, vacationing in Columbus, Ga., spiked rumors that she had come South to marry her "very old friend," Corporal Louis Riley, peacetime Manhattan real-estate dealer, now stationed at nearby Fort Benning. The once divorced, once widowed cinemactress gave a party for the Corporal, invited his entire company, later said: "I am a woman of 36 and I have sense enough to announce it if I intend to get married."

Elena of Italy, towering wife of pint-sized Ex-King Victor Emmanuel, made a royal request of a U.S. friend: "some spools of white thread" with which to spend her time "making clothes and embroidering bibs."

Lieut. Colonel Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., 42, who resigned his Senate seat last February to do some real fighting overseas, captured a four-man Nazi patrol singlehanded. The grandson of famed post-War I Isolationist Senator Henry Cabot Lodge let his jeep-driver tell the tale: "Colonel Lodge . . . had spotted the Germans a long way off. When we got close to them, Colonel Lodge pulled out a pistol, leaped out of the jeep, and the prisoners threw their hands in the air."

Entrances

The Earl of Halifax, accepting membership in the Hobo Fellowship of America, told Manhattan's Hobo News that "the life of a hobo . . . develops . . . self-reliance, initiative and a certain tolerance of other people's views. If a hobo is ... someone who roves about and lives away from home, certainly I'm a hobo."

Frank Sinatra, teatiming at the White House at the invitation of Democratic Chairman Robert Hannegan (who also brought along Manhattan Restaurateur Toots Shor, an ex-bouncer, and Funnyman "Rags" Ragland, an ex-burlesque comic), was kidded by the President about "the art of how to make girls faint," and came away determined to buy radio time of his own to campaign for Term IV. Observed The Voice: "My fans are not all teenagers. . . . Besides, even the 15-year-olds can influence people."

Franklin Pierce Adams, diarist-columnist (F.P.A.) turned nostalgia expert (of Information Please), was nominated as Democratic candidate for Connecticut's Senate, from a rock-ribbed Republican district. His campaign strategy: mostly "to keep my trap shut."

Exits

Ethel Merman, bouncy, bugle-voiced musicomedienne, cast in the title role of Sadie Thompson, a musical version of Broadway's 1922 smash hit Rain, left the show three weeks before its Philadelphia opening because she did not like the lyrics, was replaced by bright and brassy Musicomedienne June Havoc.

Carole Landis, blonde cinemarmful, who started off a U.S.O. tour last year by marrying Army Air Forces Major Thomas Wallace, returned from another U.S.O. tour to announce that the marriage was a bust. She blamed Hollywood's portrayal of her first tour and marriage in Four Jills in A Jeep. Said she: "I liked him as he was. Our trouble started when he tried to be like the man in the picture. . . ."

Gerald Lyman Kenneth Smith, self-styled "rabble-rouser of the Right," held a Manhattan press conference, as the presidential candidate of the America First Party. He had hardly begun a tirade on "agents provocateurs like John Roy Carlson" (author of Under Cover, best-selling expose of U.S. fascists) when he was interrupted: "Mr. Smith, do you know who I am? . . . I'm Carlson, and what you're saying is a pack of lies." Big, beefy Gerald L.K. rushed across the room, seized pint-sized Carlson by the neck, hustled him out the door. "I brand you as an agent provocateur and a racketeer," he bellowed. "Get out and stay out." Carlson thumbed his nose, shouted back before the door slammed shut: "You're a faker, Gerald L. K. Smith. You're a phony."

Bing Crosby, who is used to roaring welcomes and full houses, got the accustomed welcome when he appeared before a U.S. regiment on the Alsace-Lorraine front, but was left singing to an empty house when word came that the Nazis had attacked.

Sir Thomas Beecham, newly returned to London from the U.S., full of beans and bounce as usual, whipped into a London Philharmonic rehearsal of Sibelius' Sixth Symphony, promptly broke his baton in half, seized another so firmly that it cracked, imbedding a splinter in the palm of his hand. He taxied to a hospital, had the splinter removed, resumed rehearsal, kept the splinter for a souvenir.

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