To Have & Have Not

The U.S. Treasury finally got around to the tentative listing of the nation's top wage-earners for 1946.* Cinemagnate Charles P. Skouras (for the second straight year) led the field with $985,300. Other movie folk in the top ten: Director William (The Best Years of Our Lives) Wyler ($432,000) and Bing Crosby ($325,000). Betty ("Legs") Grable, with a tidy $299,300, was the top moneymaker among U.S. women (trumpeting husband Harry James did $100,036 worth of breadwinning in the movies alone). Automaker Charles E. Wilson (General Motors) made $337,193, and the late super-Huckster George Washington Hill (American Tobacco Co.), $295,611.

Winston Churchill, certain of his powers of political evaluation, made a -L-100 bet with Dr. James C. Young of Minneapolis in 1901 that the British Empire would remain intact for at least another ten years (TIME, March 19, 1945). Last week, Winnie himself underwent evaluation of a sort: the written record of the bet sold at auction for -L-80.

Frank Stranahan of Toledo, who won the British Amateur golf championship five weeks ago (TIME, June 7), got some friendly advice from an unexpected source. After being presented to King George VI, he reported, "The King told me he thought I turned my left hand too far over when I grip the club."

Airman-Movieman Howard Hughes, who claims that the United Aircraft Corp. was responsible for his near-fatal plane crash two years ago (their propellers were faulty, he charges), set a value of $250,000 on the damages to himself, $238,000 on damages to his Hughes Tool Co.

Egypt's King Farouk, who loves flashy cars (he owns a flock of red & black limousines), planned to add a utilitarian touch to his collection: he ordered twelve red jeeps, four for general work around the palace grounds, eight equipped with chrome bumpers, red leather seats, white metal wheels and fire sirens, to escort his personal car.

The Working Class

In Los Angeles, aging (70) Lloyd C. (The Robe) Douglas was finishing up what he insists will be his last novel, The Big Fisherman, and was going to have it published on his own terms: "There will be no movie, no radio broadcasts, no condensations, no serializations, and no book clubs . . . Anybody who wants this book will have to buy it from a book store." Calming down a bit, in an interview with Script Magazine, he added: "I'm just an irascible old man who has written a book and wants it to stay a book."

In Los Angeles, Michigan's football immortal, Tommy Harmon, lately of the Los Angeles Rams, signed up as sports director for a local radio station, announced that from now on any play calling he might do would be from radio and television booths.

Claire Chennault, a wartime star pitcher on his Fourteenth Air Force Headquarters softball team, moved into the executive side of the game: he was appointed commissioner of baseball for China.

The Metropolitan Opera's brawny glamor boy, Basso Ezio Pinza, who has long had his eye on Hollywood,* took a step in that direction: he announced that he would play the lead in Rodgers & Hammerstein's new Broadway musical next winter.

Deep-chested Cinemactress Jane Russell, on moving mountains, as reported by the New York Star: "My mother taught us that no matter what happens, ask the Lord about it . . . I haven't any control over my own life, and if I did I wouldn't want it because I'd make a mess of it . . . There's no place where the Bible says God helps those who help themselves. I watch people in show business running around trying to get their names up on top . . . It's just stupid. I don't feel that anything's up to me." As for "women who sit and hiss my pictures: I sort of feel sorry for [them]. They must be very unhappy characters. It's poison to feel that way . . . Anybody who's worried or depressed or frantic is badly in need of something like love--God's love, brotherly love, the nature of God, since God is love."

Family Affairs

Princess Elizabeth, who is giving her physician the jitters because she insists on wearing high heels, walked into the latest of her "last public engagements" until late in October; all but hidden behind a mammoth bunch of flowers, she officially opened a branch of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children.

Beautiful Barbara Jo Walker, Miss America of 1947, now Mrs. John Hummel of Memphis, returned from a six-day Havana honeymoon, told a nosy reporter: "I like children and I think people who don't are monsters."

Anna Eleanor Boettiger, 21, who had fame thrust upon her as little Sistie Dall, the White House Granddaughter, back in the '30s (she changed her name after her mother remarried), made a lot of people feel a lot older by announcing that she would marry Van H. Seagraves, 25, her college sweetheart and a registered Republican of Oregon City, Ore.

Prince Consort Bernhard celebrated his 37th birthday with official promise of a more impressive designation: his mother-in-law Queen Wilhelmina requested that he be called "the Prince of The Netherlands" (a title he has owned since his marriage in 1937) after his wife Princess Regent Juliana becomes Queen Juliana in September.

Mammy-shouting Al Jolson and fourth wife Erle adopted a six-months old boy, who will be called Asa Albert. For the camera, Asa Albert registered a moment of low enthusiasm about the whole thing.

Flesh & Blood

Explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, 64, had been there before. In 1912, after being given up for dead in Korea, he had read his own obituaries. Last week, recovering in Colbrook, Conn. from a bladder operation, he read frantic rumors of his death in his hometown Citizen. "I'm a tough old guy," said he. "The next time it will be a rumor, too."

In London, natty Air Commodore Frank Whittle, 41, Britain's No. 1 jet propulsion expert (the government gave him -L-100,000 tax free last May for his pioneering in the field), announced that he would retire in August because of ill health.

An organization calling itself the Institute for the Study and Development of Male Magnetism deplored the passing of magnetic males (those with "the civilized distillation of the primitive savagery that lurks in every man's soul"). The institute, still hopeful, made a list of some surviving magnetic males, including Columbia's Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Cleveland Indians' Owner Bill Veeck, Chief of Staff General Omar Bradley, Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser.

*Including payments from corporations only, omitting investment income. *He played the minor role of Ezio Pinza in last year's Carnegie Hall.

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