Holy Ned

Arturo Toscanini, about to rehearse Milan's La Scala orchestra for his concert this week, confessed he was "frightened," called it off till the next day. "I am not worried about the public, which leaves me quite indifferent," he explained. "It is the orchestra. . . . It is 16 years since I last saw them. . . ." Next day the maestro was back in shape, shouted, stamped, gave a workman holy Ned for whistling.

Sir Thomas Beecham, chin-whiskered conductor of the London Philharmonic, who sounds off at the drop of a demiquaver, steamed into the port of Southampton from his latest U.S. junket, and sounded off: "Hollywood is a universal disaster compared to which Hitler, Himmler and Mussolini were trivial and fleeting incidents. . . . All the arts in America are a gigantic racket run by unscrupulous men for unhealthy women."

Bed & Boards

Adet Lin, 23, eldest daughter of best-selling Philosopher Lin Yutang, broke the news in Boston that she had been secretly married a fortnight to Richard Biow, 26, son of a prosperous Manhattan adman. In the couple's top-floor flat near the elevated and Boston's waterfront, Husband Biow told the press: "I guess what drew us together was--well, just our interest in each other." Said surprised Philosopher Lin (The Importance of Living) of his literary daughter (Our Family) : "She will come home after a short period--I have no doubt of it."

Mary MacArthur, 16, daughter of Actress Helen Hayes and Playwright Charles MacArthur, approached her stage debut in a speaking part.* Coming (to summer theaters in New Hope, Pa., and Suffern, N.Y.): mother & daughter in Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire.

Natalie Cantor Metzger, 29, one of Father Eddie Cantor's famous five, followed Sister Edna into divorce court. Natalie wanted her freedom from a Los Angeles antique dealer; Edna was through with Tunesmith Jimmy McHugh.

Amber got kicked out of bed. After 38 days of exposure (at $10,000 a day), the multimillion-dollar boudoir epic looked like a bust to Darryl Zanuck, who decided to throw it all away and try again, later. Blonde little Peggy Cummins, British actress who had been chosen to play the lead, was apparently out of a job. But she got another. After all that buildup as a Restoration pillow-fighter she was suddenly transferred to Bob, Son of Battle--something wholesome about a sheep dog.

Familiar Faces

Franklin D. Roosevelt was on another foreign postage stamp. The ninth nation to stamp him was Argentina, not-so-Good Neighbor in wartime.

Winston Churchill's likeness* by Douglas Chandor, well-heeled portrayer of the well-heeled; brought probably the highest U.S. price ever paid for a contemporary portrait: $25,000. The buyer: Bernard Baruch, who planned to keep it a while, then decide what museum should have it.

Fiorello LaGuardia was back in New York's City Hall, looking natural but a little handsomer than life (see cut). The city had appropriated $2,500 for the portrait by New York Times Artist-Interviewer S. J. Woolf. If the art commission approves the picture, the Little Flower will be the first ex-mayor to hang in the Hall while still alive.

Dynasts

Ferdinand of Bulgaria, ruler for 31 years, royal exile 28 more, and now "only . . . an old gardener," waited among his flowerpots and butterflies for a game warden's permit. The droop-nosed, bearded ex-ruler, now 85, had something on his mind. Royal legend had it that any family member who failed to shoot an auerhahn (game cock) each year would die. An old retainer of Ferdinand's appeared at A.M.G. headquarters, asked for the return of his master's shotgun and some shells. "The auerhahne are calling .to him now," the retainer explained.

His Highness Maharajadhiraj Raj Rajeshwar Sawai Shree Yeshwant Rao Holkar Bahadur ("His Highness the Lord Paramount, King of Kings, one-quarter-better-than-anyone-else, beautiful King Shepherd, Brave Warrior"), fabulously wealthy, smartly thin, large-eyed Maharaja of Indore, 37, arrived in the U.S. from India with his American-born third wife, Euphemia, and their two-year-old son. The Maharaja had a date in Boston for surgery on a collapsed lung. The Maharanee, whom he married in 1943 right after he divorced Wife No. 2 (also an American) in Reno, hoped to pick up some new clothes, maybe even some nylons. The hat she was wearing, she informed the press, dated back to her wedding.

Nods

President James Bryant Conant of Harvard, A.B., Ph.D., LL.D., L.H.D., Sc.D., D.C.L., 3>BK and 2X, was made an honorary Kentucky Colonel.

Lyle Saxon, late litterateur of the Louisiana bayous, got a rich and strange tribute from popular Fictioneer George Sessions Perry--a "personal" in the New Orleans Times-Picayune: "Since it is an old New Orleans custom to print one's feelings in religious matters, and since Lyle Saxon so deeply favored each of these old customs, I'd like to burn this one small candle of congratulations to God Almighty, who now has the rich, the easy yet exquisite pleasure of the company of this lonely, generous man."

* At seven she did a wordless walk-on for one performance of Victoria Regina.

* To be copied into his Big-Three-at-Yalta group portrait.

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