Just Deserts

It was indeed an honor. J. Edgar Hoover and Byron Price were offered honorary knighthoods by George VI for their wartime services--Hoover as FBI chief, Price as Director of Censorship. Price could now call himself an Honorary Knight Commander of the Civil Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.*

General Douglas MacArthur became a 33rd degree Mason.

Mayor William O'Dwyer of New York offered -- and accepted -- the position Grand Marshal in the St. Patrick's Day in San Francisco next March 14. San Francisco was going to parade on the day just so O'Dwyer could get back and parade in Manhattan on the right one (the 17th).

An agreeable group calling itself the Society for the Betterment of the Human Race picked three men and three women who have, it announced, the "natural endowments" to be the ideal "eugenic parents." The perfect ancestors turned out to be Cinemactors Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster, Radio Singer Jack Smith, and Jane Russell, Betty Grable, Linda Darnell.

The Way Things Are

"I don't think marriage was made for an artist or an artist for marriage," declared Hit Playwright Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire), himself a bachelor. "He has to keep moving around. . . . There's something static about marriage."

"You don't want to isolate children in a world of make-believe," observed Virginia O'Hanlon Douglas, 58-year-old Manhattan school principal. "But with international conditions what they are, any small happiness that can be provided to counterbalance harsh realities is a fine thing." Fifty years ago, she gained fame of a sort by writing to the New York Sun and receiving in reply the much-reprinted, beamingly sentimental editorial: "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. . . ."

"I won't say another war will wipe everybody off the face of the earth," mused Nobel Physicist Arthur H. Compton, with scientific caution. "That's pretty extreme. And it won't destroy civilization --there'll be some pieces left. But it will be an enormous setback. We'll have to start all over, from 'way back."

In Paris, a couple of dozen writers and painters--including Jean Cocteau, Louis Aragon, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse --dutifully responded to a cable from Charles Chaplin asking them to protest the deportation* to Germany of Hollywood Composer Hanns Eisler. To the Paris Embassy the celebrities sent their message: please let Eisler use his visa to France, where "we expect [him] to write the music for the film Alice in Wonderland." Said Cocteau: "If Eisler's music is good, who cares about his politics? . . . Politics are dirty. Art is pure."

In Moscow, famed Cineproducer Sergei Eisenstein took to the short waves to charge Hollywood with preaching "hatred of humanity and the Soviet Union, that great beacon of peace." Soliloquized Eisenstein reproachfully: "Can one remain an artist and not be impelled to arrest the hand which is sowing death? . . ."

In Marrakesh, Morocco, Winston Churchill settled down for six weeks in the sun and some hard work on his unfinished memoirs. Though he had not written the final volume, he already had a tentative subtitle: "In Which the Democracies Were Finally Victorious, and So Were Able to Resume the Follies Which Led Them to the Brink of Disaster."

In Hollywood, Marie ("The Body") McDonald suggested that her success was due to heredity. She responded to a This Week reporter's compliment on her famed figure: "You ought to see my mother's." Confided Marie: "My mother keeps her youthful figure because she never led the life I'm going to."

Flesh & Blood

George VI reached 52/- in good shape, celebrated quietly with a family luncheon party at Windsor and a dinner at Buckingham Palace. Back home from their honeymoon in Scotland just in time to help celebrate were Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip (who was due at the office in the Admiralty next day). But 17-year-old Princess Margaret Rose missed the luncheon--she was in bed with an ill-timed cold, brought on, according to court talk, by too many late parties recently--but made the dinner.

Mistinguett, the well-nigh immortal among girlish Parisian charmers, finally made her London debut at an unguessable age (she currently prefers 63), survived it by the skin of her teeth. A sympathetic London Casino audience that had heard rumors of her beautiful legs from their grandfathers cheered her on as she fought valiantly with her best-known song, the classic Mon Homme. She sang the opening bars, found she had forgotten the words, made a fresh attack, was stuck again. Third time, she kept going. "First-night nerves," she explained.

The night after she finally sang standing up, for the first time in six years, Soprano Marjorie Lawrence (stricken by polio in 1941) got laryngitis in Chicago and had to cancel one performance of Elektra.

Babe Ruth played a one-night stand as Santa Claus, did all right up to a point. His audience, at the Hotel Astor in Manhattan: 50 young polio patients. Santa Claus wished everybody Merry Christmas, distributed presents--and then handed out autographed baseballs.

Actress Jane Cowl observed her 63rd birthday in bed with a broken leg, in Manhattan. A truck had backed into her as she stepped out of a cab. The leg had hurt, but she didn't know till next day that it was broken. Broadway's The First Mrs. Fraser abandoned its Manhattan run ten days ahead of schedule.

Luckier than Actress Cowl was French Ambassador Henri Bonnet, 59, who escaped whole from a skidding, three-car highway collision on an icy road near Billerica, Mass.

Swedish Multimillionaire Axel Wenner-Gren, 66, whose friendship with high Nazis got him on the U.S. wartime black list, escaped with superficial head wounds when his automobile (chauffeur-driven) piled into another automobile (also chauffeur-driven) on the Mexico City-Cuernavaca highway.

The late Racketeer Bugsy Siegel's billowing young ex-landlady, Virginia Hill, who began dramatizing herself five months ago in Paris (TIME, Aug. 11), took another overdose of sleeping pills (her third, at least) in Phoenix, Ariz. Presently her condition was reported "satisfactory."

*Neither could call himself Sir--a privilege Britain reserves for British subjects and the U.S. forbids its citizens. And Hoover could not yet accept his knighthood (the U.S. Constitution forbids U.S. officials to accept such foreign honors).

*On the ground that he had got his U.S. visa by concealing his membership in the Communist Party.

/-On his actual birthday, Dec. 14; the official national birthday celebration was held on June 13, as usual.

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