True Confessions

W. C. Fields, great, greying, polyp-nosed comedian, whose propensity for strong spirits is famed,* lay abed in Los Angeles' Queen of Angels Hospital, his nose in a sling, roundly denying reports that he had fallen flat on his face. Fields: "I never reach my face when I fall flat because I can't get past my nose. ... I was leaning too heavy on a cane getting into bed. The cane slipped and I fell. It hurts quite a bit, y'know, and I have to resort to medicinal mixtures."

Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, the Chicago Tribune's stiff-necked America-firstish publisher, who bravely but barely contained himself during the election campaign, unburdened himself to a Montreal newsman: "Dewey was a very weak nominee ... he ran behind practically every other Republican candidate who was elected. ... If Dewey had been elected at all he would have had to run as a nationalist. . . . The New York point of view is not the national point of view. . . . The west, which created the Republican Party, must regain control of it, and then it can come back to power. ... I do not think that a lot of people who were active in getting the nomination for him wanted him elected, any more than they wanted Willkie four years before!"

Paulette Goddard, bright-eyed cinemadcap, childless through two marriages (to one Edgar James, and Charlie Chaplin), announced, in the sixth month of her third (to Army Captain Burgess Meredith), when "somehow the news got around," that she expects a baby next June or July.

Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, briefly in Manhattan after months overseas, turned up in a Broadway night scene. Max Huddle, 30, dance-hall manager, ex-bouncer, 4-Fer, was holding his own against four soldiers who had tried to take his taxi, when, he swore, another taxi drew up and Colonel Roosevelt stepped out, stopped the fight, told everyone to "scram." Huddle, bruised and breathing hard, filed a complaint with the Army Provost Marshal against the G.I.s, called Roosevelt a "taxi-commando, [who] acted like he was God Almighty."

Marcel Petiot, Paris' super-sadistic killer who murdered, diced and cremated some 50 bodies during the Nazi occupation, tried to wriggle out of jail last week with a new twist. Charged with murdering Frenchmen for the Gestapo, Petiot claimed the reverse was true, boasted: "I belonged to the Fly-Tox* resistance group."

William Heward Murray Walton, tall, lantern-jawed Church of England vicar, and old Japan hand (17 years), onetime editor of the Japanese Christian Quarterly, told a Church conference at Torquay, England that Japan "did more for the literacy education of her people in 60 years than the British in India in 150 years," blamed atrocities primarily on Japanese police who, he claimed, treated their own people the way they are now treating the enemy, admitted that he prayed daily for Japanese Christians, added: "I pray for victory--and the whopping defeat of Japan."

Fellow Travelers

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, no-longer-popular British humorist (Thank You Jeeves, Meet Mr. Mulliner), was on his way back to the coast where the Nazis found him in May 1940. Charged by the French with "voluntarily" broadcasting over the German radio, 63-year-old Wodehouse, who has admitted that the broadcasts (TIME, Sept. 11) were "a serious mistake," was ordered banished from Paris, allowed to choose a new home near his bombed-out coastal villa at Le Touquet. Between denials that he was a Nazi sympathizer, Author Wodehouse, wise to concentration-camp procedure, passed his prison hours making out a list of things he would need in exile.

Robert Murphy, bonhomous, big-footed U.S. career diplomat, now political adviser to General Eisenhower, bunked at an Army-requisitioned hotel in Luxembourg, automatically put his shoes outside his door for the night. Next morning he found them polished to perfection, noted that the candy he had placed in them as a tip was still there, together with a note: "Regulations prevent officers of the U.S. Army from accepting any gratuities." A general's aide had done a G.I. job on Murphy's footwear.

Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, commanding British troops in the Low Countries, received a surprise package of six goldfish, the gift of the American Legion's Missouri Forty & Eight Chapter, which thought the General would appreciate some silent pets. Said Monty: "Thank you very much. They arrived yesterday, via Paris, only seven days en route, and were in terrific heart."

Adolf Hitler, whose present whereabouts and health have been subject to worldwide conjecture, had his ears measured by London's Daily Express. Conclusion: the "Hitler" in Hitler's most recent "official" photograph is a stand- in: his right ear measures half an inch longer each way than the right ear on Hitler's prewar photographs.

Personal Opinions

Lillian Hellman, America's foremost female playwright, a guest in Moscow of the Soviet Cultural Society VOKS, staggered her hosts with the admission: "I don't really like the theater very much"; admonished topflight actors assembled in her behalf that "an actor doesn't make much difference to the play" (she has two, Watch on the Rhine,* The Little Foxes, now in Moscow rehearsal); received the private plaudits of drama directors (alike the world over), who whispered: "That was pretty good, what you said about actors."

Kathleen Winsor, twentyish, sleek, shiny, button-eyed author of the U.S.'s fastest-selling literary striptease, Forever Amber, found that what was bad enough for Boston's Watch & Ward Society was bad enough for the U.S. Naval Academy Library./- Amber's ban extends only to midshipmen, however, permits faculty members and their families to read the book.

* Favorite tipples: Irish whiskey, Martinis.

*A commercial insect killer.

* Whose Moscow title will be The Farrelli Family Loses Its Peace.

/- Whose committee (three Navy captains, heads of Academy departments) has banned only one other book in recent years: Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit.

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