The Golden West

Hollywood stayed right in its groove. Rita Hay worth took steps to have her two-year-old daughter (by Orson Welles) made a corporation director in mother's new producing firm. Actor Wallace Ford beat a drunken driving rap by explaining that he drove the way he did because his whiskers kept blowing in his face. Ex-Ziegfeld Beauty Boots Mallory, arrested for drunken driving, was freed to await trial. Actor Lionel Stander & wife filed petitions in bankruptcy, listing assets of $3,150, liabilities of $33,772.77. Actor Lawrence (Dillinger) Tierney, who had been spending his weekends in jail for boozing, fought his brother in the street over a girl and ended up with 90 days on the road gang. Columbia Pictures, on complaint of British censors, had to reshoot a twin-bed scene between Franchot Tone and Lucille Ball--with the beds moved a decent twelve inches apart.

The Laurels

Awarded to Robert Penn Warren, 42, Southern poet-novelist: the Pulitzer Prize, for his novel about a Huey Longish demagogue, All the King's Men (TIME, Aug. 26). To Robert Lowell, 29, cousin of the late Poetess Amy Lowell (and husband of Novelist Jean Stafford), went the poetry prize, for Lord Weary's Castle (TIME, Dec. 16). Both prizes had been skipped last year; this year the judges decided to skip the drama prize.

Also Pulitzered: New York Times Drama Critic Brooks Atkinson, for distinguished correspondence (from Russia last year); Williams College President James Phinney Baxter III, for Scientists Against Time (history). The best biography, decided the judges, was The Autobiography of William Allen White (TIME, March 18, 1946), whose author died in 1944, at 75. One significant sign of the times: the prize for distinguished work as a reporter went to the New York World-Telegram's single-minded Frederick Woltman, who keeps a close and watchful eye on left-wing activities; he won the citation for his periodic pieces on "the infiltration of Communism in the United States."

Awarded to Marlene Dietrich (mother of 22-year-old Actress Maria Manton), to Lana Turner (mother of three-year-old Cheryl), and to Belle Taylor Tierney (mother of Actress Gene, 26, and Sister Pat): places on a list of "the most glamorous mothers in the U.S." The judges: 80 obliging magazine illustrators.

Praised from all sides by his banqueting flock: roly-poly old (seventyish) Father Divine, who celebrated his year-old marriage to blonde Edna Rose Ritchings, 22, with a medium-staggering dinner in Pine Brook, NJ. Over the happy couple gleamed a purple neon sign: "God's Holy Communion Table of Palace Mission." The bride wore a white gown and gold slippers. Fifty girls in uniforms marked with Vs (for Virtue, Victory and Virginity) choired the host's praises. The guests sat down in early afternoon to a menu featuring 60 kinds of meat, 54 vegetables, 23 salads, eleven jellies and jams, and 38 desserts--and rose as best they could approximately seven hours later.

Struggling Authors

Konrad Bercovici, who had charged Charles Chaplin with copping the idea for The Great Dictator from him, didn't get the $6,450,000 he sued for, but he did all right. After nine days in court (during which Bercovici displayed a Bercovici script about dictators and Chaplin said he had never seen it), the novelist and the comic settled things by agreeing that 1) The Great Dictator was Chaplin's idea, and Chaplin had all rights to it; 2) Chaplin could have the movie rights to two Bercovici stories; and 3) Bercovici could have $95,000.

Vincent McHugh, formerly noted for prose (Sing Before Breakfast), became a notable poet overnight when veteran Dirt Chaser John S. Sumner got McHugh's publishers into a Manhattan court on an obscenity charge. The book under discussion: McHugh's just-published The Blue Hen's Chickens. What probably shocked Sumner (though he didn't say): an octet of pornographic love poems, "derived" from a translation of Catullus. To Sumner's charge, Random House's joke-collecting President Bennett Cerf (Try and Stop Me) cried: "Absurd!" But Publisher Cerf was not all indignation. "Maybe," he mused, "it will help good poetry get some sales."

Columnist Eleanor Roosevelt's week had its heart-warming aspects. In New York, her driving license was reinstated 15 weeks after she lost it for that three-way traffic smashup last summer.

The Old Gang

To Admiral Richmond Pearson Hobson, who had a, go at bottling up the Spanish Fleet in Santiago Harbor, went a standard honor, nearly half a century after his triumph and ten years after his death: the Hobson manse in Greensboro, Ala. was dedicated as a public shrine.

Evalyn Walsh McLean, Washington's late, free-handed hostess, turned out to have been a rather cautious grandmother. Her will distributed her estate (including the Hope Diamond) equally among her seven grandchildren--but it left plenty of time for everybody to thresh everything out (including the distribution of the 44 1/4-carat diamond). The divvy was not to be made until 1967.

Henry Agard Wallace, who frequently complains that newsmen misquote him, put his foot down when a radio mike was set before him at a Washington press conference. He put the mike on the floor and his foot on the mike (see cut). His explanation: "I can't talk freely if this is to be broadcast." Mutual broadcast some of the muffled flubdub anyway, presented it as "what Henry Wallace sounds like talking out of his left foot."

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