Vision

Elliott Roosevelt peered ahead at life without price controls, reported back: "You will see bread at $15 a loaf." Robert M. Hutchins, chancellor of the University of Chicago, peeked around the atomic corner and saw "an era of leisure and plenty," but he was not happy. "If we are not all killed in the next few years," he declared, "we will be bored to death." George Santayana, 83-year-old poet-philosopher, now resident in Italy, guessed:"I won't live to see it, but I believe that Russia soon may dominate all of Europe -- with Germany and France going Communistic willingly and other nations following. And it's possible this change can occur without war." He took it philosophically. "If Communism came to Italy tomorrow," said he, "I'd say : 'Well, let's try it.' "

Responses Eleanor Roosevelt was asked the oldest living question in, newspaper interviews: what do you eat? The answer: whatever the others eat, since she rarely eats alone. Otherwise: fruit, coffee and one piece of toast for breakfast (after an eye opener of hot water and lemon juice) ; crackers and milk for lunch ; "I'm usually out to dinner." Jules Romaines, France's marathon serialist (Men of Good Will), clucked sadly at the writer's lot in the U.S., where "a writer ... is regarded as a specialist . . .

expected to know his place." Pursued Romains (in Town & Country): "He is granted the right to hold an opinion on writing; he may even be allowed a word upon success in general, figuring in a magazine symposium alongside a stockbroker, an advertising man, and a manufacturer of elastic girdles. But his credit stops there."

John S. Sumner, tireless peeper for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, clucked at current life & letters generally, but he was not downhearted. "The pendulum always swings wide from one side to another," said he. "The decollete of the Directoire was followed by the pantalettes of the Victorian era." Had he noticed the latest bathing suits? He never visited the beach. "If they can swim better in them," he hazarded generously, "I suppose they are all right; but if they sink they have themselves to blame."

Greer Garson, Miriam Hopkins, and Grace Moore moved something called the Hollywood Bachelors' Club to the week's unlikeliest outburst of self-expression. These three ladies, said the fellows, were their very favorite "cats." Then the bachelors explained: "Kittenish dames give us the wim-wams. But it takes a smart woman to be downright catty."

Ludwig Bemelmans, cosmopolitan chronicler of life backstairs (Hotel Splendide), headed home from London after giving Britons his inside dope on Hollywood, where he spent three years. "If you stay too long," said he gravely, "you wake up one day and find you are 84 and it's all been a pleasant dream."

Longevity Senator David I. Walsh, 74, took off his hat and coat as he entered a Northampton, Mass, hotel, automatically handed them to a young fellow who murmured,

"I'll take them," ultimately got them back through the police.

Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, now a gaffer of 79, emerged briefly from latter-day obscurity when a news photographer snapped him at a Cambridge University ceremony. Only faintly discernible now were the once famed features of England's burly, pipe-smoking Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (see cut).

Admiral George Dewey was doing all right. A Manhattan picture-framing firm, totting up its year's orders, discovered that, after Generals MacArthur and Eisenhower, the Admiral was still the most-framed warrior.

John Dillinger, most famed modern badman, beat a rap twelve years after he was shot dead. The prosecutor's office in Lake County, Indiana, was just getting around to dismissing an old murder indictment against him.

Natural Shocks Mayor William O'Dwyer, exhausted, took his doctor's advice, entrained in Manhattan for a rest at his brother's ranch in California.

Franz Lehar, reported the Paris press, was at his villa in the Austrian Tyrol, recovering from an eye operation, and working on his 34th operetta.

Josephine Baker, golden brown toast of prewar Paris music halls, was in a Neuilly hospital, making slow recovery from an intestinal ailment. She had a new piece of finery: a Medal of Resistance, with Rosette, given her for aiding French Intelligence in Lisbon and North Africa early in the war.

Clark Gable entered a Los Angeles hospital for an operation to get rid of a wart on his tongue.

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