Hearth & Home

A lot of people suddenly felt a lot older.

Joan Bennett's daughter Diana let it be known that she would be married in May.

Marlene Dietrich's daughter Maria--now married to her second--expected a baby in July.

Gloria Swanson's daughter, Mrs. Robert William Anderson, appeared in a Town & Country magazine photograph with little Christopher and Lawrence--la Swanson's grandchildren.

And in North Bay. Ont., a daughter was born to the Ernest Dionnes. This made the 13-year-old Dionne Quintuplets aunts.

Travel & Recreation

Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret paid a visit to a reclamation project, where the wind proved bitter arid the Queen proved adaptable. For the sake of her ears she put on a scarf; for the sake of appearance she left on her hat. The result faintly suggested a Conestoga wagon (see cut).

Belgium's exiled King Leopold III stepped off a chartered Dutch freighter at Havana with his beauteous commoner wife, the Princess de Rethy, his begoggled son, Prince Baudouin, and 40 pieces of baggage. Cuba's Major General Genovevo Perez Damera and a battery of cameramen gave the party a royal welcome (see cut). The Hotel Nacional apologetically provided the best in the house--a mere presidential suite, but free. Cuban Sugaristocrat Jose Gomez Mena threw a great big garden party. After two weeks of "recreation and study" (the Princess raised some eyebrows by recreating in slacks), the-royal family planned to steam off to the U.S., then back to Europe.

Russell K. Height Jr., 28-year-old ex-G.I. who had a brief blaze of glory as a brigadier general of the Moslem raiders in Kashmir (until the U.S. State Department put on the damper), landed back in Denver. British-born Mrs. Haight promptly slipped on the leash: "We're going to raise a family--five or six." Said husband Haight: "I will cooperate."

In Hollywood, Visitor Bea Lillie made an illuminating reply to Joan Crawford, who invited her around to meet Visitor Noel Coward. "Thanks," refused Actress Lillie, "I've met him."

Bows & Scrapes

"I do not want to talk to anybody alive or dead," declared talkative Bernard Shaw. It was half of his answer to Gallup pollsters asking Britons which of their famed countrymen (dead or alive) they most wanted to talk to. "If I craved for entertaining conversation by a first-class raconteur," Shaw went on, "I would choose Oscar Wilde."* In the poll, Shaw himself ranked 27th. Most-sought-after was:

Winston Churchill, who was not at all a favorite of Cleveland Baptist Dr. Bernard C. Clausen, who enlivened a temperance lecture with his own account of Churchill's preparation for the famed Fulton, Mo. talk in 1946. Confided Dr. Clausen: "He loaded himself with champagne and whiskey and highballs and wine. . . ."

Eleanor Roosevelt was the "favorite American" of Woman's Home Companion readers, announced the magazine after taking a poll. Runner-up: Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, 50, pre-Anschluss chancellor of Austria, won a job lecturing at St. Louis University.

South Africa's 77-year-old Prime Minister Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts; also got the academic nod. He was. picked to succeed the late Stanley Baldwin, ist Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, as Chancellor of Cambridge University (stipend: none; duties: next to none).

Historian, Charles Beard (The Republic, Whither Mankind) got the august National Institute of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal "for distinguished achievement." Fellow Scholar Lewis Mumford ( Technics and Civilization, Whither Honolulu?) promptly resigned from the Institute as a protest at Beard's "one-sided, partial view of history, designed to bolster his own isolation[ism]." Although Mumford's resignation was the 24th in the Institute's 50-year history, there was still no provision for resignation in the bylaws. The Institute, declared President Douglas Moore, after a little thought, would just note Mumford's defection and forget it.

Simon Bolivar won a bow from Walt Disney. When the Venezuela Motion Picture Workers' Union made outcry because a Disney dog bore the national hero's name, Disney promptly promised to change it.

Legacies

The will of Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen, British tobacco magnate, left to his estranged, American-born wife, Mauricia, nothing; to his three children by a previous marriage, small shares in cash ; to red-headed ex-Ballerina Marjorie Daw, now the sole tenant of his Sunningdale Park mansion, an estimated $3,800,000 (half in trust, to go to the children on her death).

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi left no will, virtually no earthly possessions.

*Like Shaw, an Irishman.

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