Slings & Arrows

Secretary of Agriculture Clinton P. Anderson set his hand to a little mowing, just for the exercise. The scene: ex-Democratic Treasurer Ed Pauley's Hawaiian estate. Agriculturist Anderson gripped the handle of a motorized lawnmower and then the handle gripped Anderson. Injuries : two broken fingers.

Helen Hayes, whose playwright husband, Charles MacArthur, slipped in the shower last year and cracked a rib, slipped in the same shower, grabbed at a porcelain grip, broke it, sliced her right forearm ten stitches worth.

Perry Como joined the pelted crooners of history. Rudy Vallee had been struck by a grapefruit (1931); Frank Sinatra by an egg (1944); Crooner Como, deep in Dream, Dream,Dream at a Chicago theater, was awakened last week by a hunk of hard candy. His injury: a lump on the noggin.

Old, Sweet Song

The heat in & around Hollywood was intense. At a recording session the slip-horn's balding Tommy Dorsey, 41, knocked the clarinet's balding Benny Goodman, 38, through the music stands. When Goodman arrived late on the job and tootled tootles that weren't in the script, Dorsey got his dander up. The standard Hollywood windmilling followed --and then the standard flubdub to the press. Goodman: "I was just sitting there playing my clarinet when I got hit." Dorsey: "I couldn't punch my way out of a paper bag."

Arrested and jugged overnight for drunkenness were John D. Spreckels III, 38, one of the playboys who share the Spreckels sugar fortune, and his curlylocked third wife, Lou Dell, 37. Heretofore John's fun-loving, free-swinging cousin, Adolph B. Jr.,*had tended to hog the limelight of the tabloids, but John and Lou Dell won through last week with a knock-down-drag-out fight in the middle of Los Angeles' Santa Monica Boulevard. While the Spreckelses whaled away with enough vigor to leave each other bruised about the head and ears (see cuts), crowds gathered and rooted. But the finish lacked punch. "It was all my fault," cried Lou Dell. "All right, honey," comforted Spreckels, "I don't care ... I know that we shouldn't be doing this. We might be hit by traffic." Explained Spreckels to the world at large: "It was just one of those family arguments."

Cinemactress Greer Garson, pushing 40, who played 28-year-old Cinemactor Richard Ney's mother in Mrs. Miniver a while back, finally sued him for divorce after four years of marriage, seven months of separation.

Actress Joyce Mathews, whose first husband was a son of Venezuela's late Dictator Juan Vicente ("Tyrant of the Andes") Gomez, said she was now going to divorce Comedian Milton Berle. She added sweetly that he was "a swell person and a great artist" anyway.

Elsewhere life was much prettier. Alabama's 38-year-old Governor Jim Folsom, who stands 6 ft. 8 in. and goes in for the homespun manner, went calling on the 18-year-old daughter of California's Governor Earl Warren. The press was promptly awash in dewy anticipation. "We did a little sight-seein'," reported Folsom, a widower and father of two. "And ... we had some dinner and dancin'." Was it serious between him and Virginia? "That's a 'no comment' question, honey," said he. But he was shortly moved to an extension of remarks. "Takin' a girl out is all part of nature," mused the rough-hewn Governor. ". . . And I'm a man who likes to get close to nature."

From Cannes on the languorous Riviera came a romantic dispatch from Columnist Elsa Maxwell. She had overheard a conversation between Heiress Barbara Hutton and her new (fourth) husband, Prince Igor Troubetzkoy. Heiress Hutton: "Igor, you are so vague today." Prince Igor: "Naturally, darling, when I am living in a wonderful dream." Crowed happy Columnist Maxwell: "A neat phrase, and he looked as though he meant it." Barbara was going to take Igor to her nest in Tangier, said Miss Maxwell. "Barbara's bathroom looks out on a minaret. Every evening as the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer, so close is Barbara's window that. . . she can see him clear his throat."

The Literary Life

"The phrasing is too elaborate," wrote the late Woodrow Wilson, in an old letter just made public last week. The professor-President was criticizing his own literary Style. "The transitions are managed too Smoothly . . ." he wrote. "The treatment plays in circles. . . . The sentences are too obviously wrought out with a nice workmanship. They do not sound as if they had come spontaneously."

William Saroyan, who also writes, prepared to send up another Saroyanesque rocket after a long, tense quiet. Out next fortnight: a new play (not yet produced), called Jim Dandy: Fat Man in a Famine. "The action takes place in a transparent egg shell," announced Publishers Harcourt, Brace in ventriloquial tones, "inside which are miserable and majestic ruins, representing immemorial and immediate reality."

*Not to be confused with John's fun-loving brother, Adolph B. III.

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