Trials & Tribulations

At Fontaine de Vaucluse, France, Sportsman Winston Churchill submitted, with what appeared to be less than his usual zest, to a friendly gesture by enthusiastic townspeople. Escorted triumphantly home from a day's painting astride an unimpressed donkey, he looked not unlike a latterday, sober and cheroot-clamping Silenus (see cut).

In power-rationed Madrid, Senator Alben W. Berkley (en route to the Inter-Parliamentary Union meeting in Rome) tripped in the dark, jammed his hand through a glass door, escaped with superficial cuts and scratches.

In Venice, Orson Welles, aging (33) young genius of stage & screen, also picked up a few nasty gashes. His new movie, Macbeth (which was shot in 21 days), was run off for the first time in public at the Venice Film Festival, to a chorus of boos and hisses from the critics. One called it "frantic, convulsed, and truculent"; another, "poor production with amateur direction and bad interpretation."

Also in Venice, Cinemagnate Mary Pickford, who was the long-curled America's Sweetheart 30-odd years ago, had the misfortune to be caught by an ungentlemanly cameraman (see cut) in the pitiless blaze of a late afternoon sun.

In Jamaica, N.Y., at Aqueduct race track, Sportsman Pete Bostwick got stuck with a dead horse. He claimed Kordofan, a seven-year-old gelding, in a $5,200 claiming race. Kordofan fell and broke its leg, and had to be destroyed. According to the rules, Bostwick paid up.

The Old Gang

Robert Tyre ("Bobby") Jones, golf's once great grand-slammer (in 1930, the British Open & Amateur, the U.S. Open & Amateur), called up the Atlanta express company with a small request. When he gave his name, he was asked: "Are you the father of the kid who just won the city golf title?" Jones admitted it. "Okay," came the respectful reply. "We'll get busy on it right away."

Time had mellowed black-browed Bill ("Sweet William") Terry, the terrible-tempered scourge of National League pitchers and sportwriters in the '30s. As a director of the Memphis Country Club, scene of the U.S. Amateur Golf Tournament (see SPORT), he pitched in and did a bangup job as chairman of press relations.

Mary Garden, who is still remembered by many operagoers as the sexiest Thais in history, was considering a comeback, at 71. After more than ten years of retirement, she was thinking of returning to the U.S. from her native Aberdeen, Scotland, to swing around on a lecture tour.

Things were looking up for Patricia ("Satira") Schmidt, the belly-dancer sentenced to 15 years in a Havana prison for drilling her yachtsman lover with a .22. Rumor had it that one c: the first acts of Cuba's new administration would be to spring Satira (by October, she would have served 17 months of her sentence).

Fifteen months after he was sentenced to eight years as a big-shot Nazi, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, Hitler's onetime financial expert, was set free. As his sentence was set aside by a German court of appeals, both U.S. officials and fellow prisoners grumbled that the action was "incomprehensible." But the late great humor magazine Simplicissimus would not have been surprised. In 1931 Simplicissimus had printed a little poem by a minor poet named Karl Kindt:

And when, we go to war at last, Just fight and die--you duffer!

For win or lose, the war once past, Be sure Herr Schacht won't suffer!

The Furrowed Brow

William O'Dwyer, Mayor of New York City (pop. 7,500,000), and Mrs. Joe R. Pruitt, Mayoress of Smyrna, Ga. (pop. 1,440), got together in O'Dwyer's town to talk a little shop. Their agreement: "People get impatient with the Mayor regardless of where they live."

James Michael Curley, Mayor of Boston, had come to a cynical conclusion about justice (His Honor recently served five months of a six-to-18-month rap for mail fraud). "If a judge had a good breakfast and was on good terms with his wife when he came into court, then a defendant might get one to three months' sentence," he told 1,000 members of the American Prison Association. "But if the judge did not enjoy his breakfast and came into court ill-tempered, the defendant might get three to five years."

Jacob Lomakin, ex-Soviet Consul General in New York, took time on the long voyage home to recall his life in the U.S. with bitterness. The Soviet Consulate, he claimed, had been treated unfairly: "Four years ago we paid $15,000 yearly [for rent of the mansion off Fifth Avenue]. Then the landlady made it $30,000. Now for the coming year she wanted $50,000. And without fixing the elevator. Something," he mused, "is behind it."

For Billy Rose, at present busily revamping the Met (see Music), it was like eld times. When the New York Herald Tribune refused to run one of his columns lambasting the Met's directors as "lifted-pinky entrepreneurs," he bought himself advertising space in the Daily News and happily let fly (TIME, Sept. 6). Next day the News had some fun, too. In an editorial it welcomed Billy back ("That was how Billy got his start as a columnist") and gaily twitted the Trib: "The trouble was that Mr. Rose had some exceedingly salty things to say about the Social Register folks who boss the Metropolitan Opera. The Herald Tribune loves if not worships most of these same folks, and it just couldn't bring itself to let this uncouth Broadway showman trample their corns."

Hearth & Home

Producer Lee Shubert, dynamic little theatrical dynast and perennial bachelor-about-Broadway, finally had to drop the pretense when his honey-blonde bride of twelve years got a Reno divorce.

Countess Eddo Ciano, 40, daughter of the late Benito Mussolini, angrily denied rumors that she had married one Pietro Capuano last November. When reporters pestered her about it, she told them off in the old, familiar, highhanded manner, while Pietro sat in the background and let her do the talking.

Author John Steinbeck walked out on his marriage; he left Manhattan and Gwyn Conger, No. 2, for Monterey, Calif., and a new book.

Peripatetic Journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt, great-great-grandson of the commodore, decided to give it another try. He prepared to marry his fifth, Mrs. Patricia Wallis, in Greenwich, Conn. And this time, he was going to do it right: the justice of the peace who would marry them had done the honors "three or four times" for Tommy Manville.

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