So They Say

In the spit-and-scratch school of society reporting in the nation's capital, two of the sharpest-clawed are Austine McDonnell Cassini Hearst of the Washington Times-Herald and Evelyn Peyton Gordon March of the Washington Daily News.

Three weeks ago, at the winter get-together of the Gridiron Widows, the distaff side of the Gridiron Club, "Evie" cast an appraising eye over "Bootsie's" figure. Sweetly, she remarked that Bootsie, who gave birth to a son six months before, looked quite "robust." In her next column, Evie elaborated on her suspicions: "The stork, so 'they' say, is once more hovering some distance over the William Randolph Hearst Jrs.' . . . house, right on the heels of William Randolph Hearst III's first encounter with this bitter old world . . ." Washington dowagers and debutantes, who find the pearls in Evie's column as important as the pearl onions in their Gib sons, promptly swallowed the news. After all, hadn't Evie scooped even Bootsie with the news that William III was on the way? Last week, after brooding darkly about the whole thing, Columnist Hearst scratched back at Columnist March: "Friends will be pleased and amazed to learn that Newsgal Evelyn Peyton Gordon at long last is expecting." No one was more amazed than fortyish, married and childless Evie; she was too mad even to scratch back. The sound of strife on Washington's back fence died away. Titillated readers of the society columns would have to go to the right cocktail parties to find out that the stork was orbiting over neither of the contestants.

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