Monday, Dec. 31, 1945

First Families

Private Jacob L. ("Jakie") Webb, 27, playful great-great-grandson of the original Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, sued his wife for divorce while he sweated out a sentence, his second, for going AWOL. The wife: Cafe Society Character Lenore Lemmon, who married him in 1941 and abruptly went home to mother crying that he was tattooed from head to foot. Jakie's divorce charge: she was AWOL.

Winston Churchill had another divorce in the family--the second in 1945.* Year's first had been Daughter Sarah's from Comedian Vic Oliver. Now column-writing Son Randolph was dropped by the former Pamela Digby, after six years, one son. Said she: 1) he had been rude to her in public; 2) had once walked out in the middle of the night; 3) had spent evenings at the officers' mess; 4) had told her he was "fed up"; 5) had "seemed to prefer a bachelor's existence." She got custody of five-year-old Winston II.

Winston I looked forward to a holiday in the U.S. His physician had urged "a month or more in a warm climate and . . . complete rest." He would soak up sunlight, brandy and cigar smoke at the Miami home of Canadian Papermaker Frank W. Clarke, his Laurentian camp host after the 1943 meeting with Franklin Roosevelt.

Princess Elizabeth, Britain's 19-year-old heiress presumptive, who recently gave an inkling of what goes on in her pretty young head by choosing Bing Crosby as her favorite crooner, waltzed with a chef in the Royal Servants' Hall of Buckingham Palace. In the same room Lillibet's royal father was taking a whirl with the butler's wife, and her mother with a footman. The occasion: the household staff's annual Christmas party, at which the members of the royal family customarily democratize, the staff admirably Crichton.

Henry Ford, who has always run his business as a family concern, banqueted the faithful Ford workers who had stuck through 35 years of war & peace, paternally put his own famed family on display (see cut).

Juan Jose Arevalo, President of Guatemala, in a plaster cast, gingerly resumed some of his duties of office. On his way to a quiet holiday in the mountains, the President and his auto had shot off the edge of a 400-ft. precipice. Car and engine bounced apart on the way down. The President miraculously broke nothing.

*Diana Churchill had earlier divorced her husband. The Churchill record: four children, three divorces. The Roosevelt record: five children, four divorces.

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