The Strenuous Life

Goateed Sir Hubert Wilkins, 47, intrepid Arctic explorer, faced a new challenge: in Seattle a stalled elevator trapped him (and the operator) between floors for ten minutes. Sir Hubert finally fought his way back to civilization by clambering up through the emergency exit.

Actor Basil Rathbone, 55, came a painful cropper. His black police dog, Maritza, snapped the leash while the two were strolling in Manhattan's Central Park; Maritza leaped a high wall and dashed into Fifth Avenue traffic; Rathbone tried to follow suit, fell over the wall, broke his left wrist, and fainted. Skipped: one performance of the Broadway hit, The Heiress. Thereafter he villainized with his arm in a cast.

Maestro Artur Rodzinski of the Chicago Symphony took a pratfall by trying to take too good care of himself. He failed to turn up at 11 a.m. for the dress rehearsal of Tristan with Flagstad (see col. 3). He was still missing at 2:30 p.m. When he did appear, after another wait, he was still pale around the gills.. Mrs Rodzinski explained: "He took a sleeping pill that didn't work. Then he took another kind. In the morning he is sick. The doctor say the two kinds create a poison. . . ." And on top of it all his chauffeur had let him out at the wrong concert hall.

The Literary Life

Time had not changed the quality of Litterateur Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County: in Albany, nearly a year after a lower court fined Hecate's publishers $1,000, the state Court of Appeals decided unanimously that the book was, indeed, obscene.

Actor-Producer Orson Welles's troubles with his seven-year-old cinema Citizen Kane (which William Randolph Hearst refused to advertise in his papers) were still following him. Filed in a Manhattan court by Biographer Ferdinand Lundberg: a suit for damages (amount unspecified), charging that Wonder Boy Welles had copped the idea from Biographer Lundberg's Imperial Hearst.

"The life story of Edna St. Vincent Millay," reported Gossip Columnist Danton Walker, "may be a new biographical film." A few days before, Walker had reported: "Alice B. Toklas . . . [is] returning here from Paris to buy a home in Oakland, Calif." But Columnist Walker (one of two newspapermen to make the Man of Distinction whiskey ads) was having a spell of undistinction.* In Austerlitz, N.Y., Pulitzer Prize Poetess Millay averred that she had never heard of such a thing. In Paris, the famed bosom friend of the late Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) announced: "I have no intention of going to the States; I am going to stay in Paris."

In Richmond, Old School Stylist James Branch Cabell, who knows a lot of words, broke his accustomed silence to inform his publishers that he was writing a new book. "I do not think that to announce the book as 'in preparation,' " wrote Cabell, bringing memories of the oldtime Cabellian vocabulary thronging, "should be regarded as hubris."

Cheers & Catcalls

In Washington, Samuel Goldwyn got

the President's Certificate of Merit for his patriotic wartime movies--presumably including The North Star, which got such a lambasting at the congressional investigation of Little Red Hollywood.

In Manhattan, the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute unveiled a vaguely Lincolnesque figure, proudly announced that it was the one & only full-length statue of Sigmund Freud.

In Chicago, much-debated Soprano Kirsten Flagstad (did-she-or-did-she-not-collaborate?) made her postwar operatic debut in Tristan und Isolde, sang them into the aisles, got a blizzard of bravos and cheers, eleven curtain calls, not a tomato from audience or critics.

In Vienna, Wilhelm Furtwaengler, famed prewar conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic (but officially cleared of Naziism), fared less well as he appeared for a concert at the music hall. A mob met him outside with boos and catcalls, and began shoving; a Soviet sentry fired a warning shot and Furtwaengler got in. But shortly the mob got in, too. The concert and the hissing began about the same time. The demonstrators: former concentration camp inmates.

In Brooklyn, a Howard Hughes-for-President club raised its head.

Fine Feathers

The Duke & Duchess of Windsor, arriving in Manhattan for yet another vacation, were met by 50-odd reporters and cameramen, but refused to be stampeded. Said the Duke: the wedding-invitation thing was "purely personal and a family matter." The Duchess--in navy blue coachman suit with a compromise-length coat, a blue-and-brown turban, beige gloves, a mink fur piece, a pearl necklace --answered the other big question quite frankly. She thought that "people should wear skirts at the length most becoming."

In Tokyo, an inventory of Emperor Hirohito's wardrobe reached the tax office. He was ready for any weather. Items: 16 overcoats, 23 sack suits, six frock coats, five morning coats, two swallowtails, two tuxedos, four uniforms and two kimono-style wraparounds.

* For other columnar crackings, see Press.

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