Monday, Dec. 12, 1949
Divorced. By Shirley Jane Temple, 21, cinemactress: John Agar, 28, cinemactor; after four years of marriage, one daughter; in Hollywood.
Died. Philip Barry, 53, playwright who won fame & fortune from both stage & screen by specializing in smart dialogue among the smart set (Holiday, The Animal Kingdom, The Philadelphia, Story); of a heart attack; in Manhattan.
Died. Major General George Moore, 62, commander of Corregidor when it fell to the Japanese in 1942; by his own hand (his suicide note said that he feared insanity); on a mountain path near Burlingame, Calif. A crack artilleryman, Texas-born General Moore built up a record (better than 10%) average of antiaircraft destruction on Corregidor. With General Wainwright, theater commander, he surrendered the island to the Japanese and set out on the Bataan Death March to spend three years in Japanese prisons. After the war, he was Army commander in the Pacific, retired eight months ago after 40 years' service.
Died. Julius Peter ("the Just") Heil, 73, Wisconsin's chunky, ungrammatical onetime Governor (1939-42) and millionaire metal-products manufacturer; of a heart attack; in a hunting lodge near Sullivan, Wis.
Died. Maria Ouspenskaya, 73, wizened, rasp-voiced supporting actress of stage & screen (Love Affair, The Rains Came, King's Row); of second- and third-degree burns, after falling asleep while smoking in bed; in Hollywood. Russian-born, Stanislavski-trained, Mme. Ouspenskaya came to the U.S. in 1923 (as the dying woman in the Moscow Art Theater production of Gorki's The Lower Depths), divided her time between Broadway, her acting school and Hollywood, where she stole many a scene from more glamourous players, saved many a potboiler from the critics' claws with her playing of a querulous but endearing old matriarch.
Died. Frank Chambless Rand, 73, onetime president (1916-30) and board chairman (since 1930) of International Shoe Co., biggest in the U.S. (it makes more than 11% of all U.S. shoes); in St. Louis.
Died. Frederick Porter ("the Weasel") Wensley, 84, beak-nosed master sleuth, onetime head of Scotland Yard's famed C.I.D. (Criminal Investigation Department), who solved many of Britain's most famous crimes during his long (1887-1929) service; in London. No theorizing Hercule Poirot, Wensley served a rough & tumble apprenticeship in London's thug-infested East End during the Jack the Ripper era, wrote about it all in Forty Years of Scotland Yard.
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