Hearth & Home

After he married Poetess Jean Starr for the first time (she was also his third wife), wealthy Anthologist Louis Untermeyer, 64, wrote:

He lusts for freedom, cries how long Must he be bound by what controlled

him ;

Yet he is glad the chains are strong And that they hold him . . .

Last week, 30 years and four weddings later, Untermeyer walked into a Manhattan courthouse in the forlorn hope of finding out which chains legally bound. Onetime Judge Esther Antin, 50, the fourth Mrs. Untermeyer,* had asked the court to declare her his legal wife. Now living with Wife No. 5, Fiction Editor (Seventeen) Bryna Ivens, 40, Untermeyer took the position that he was still doubly-wed to No. 1 (and No. 3), Jean Starr, since his Mexican divorce from her didn't really count. (Presumably, marriage and divorce with Poetess Virginia Moore, 46, wife No. 2, was legal.) Untermeyer readily admitted that he had discussed the "present suit" with Miss Starr. "I told her [Jean] that the plaintiff [Esther] thought there were a few drops in the orange [Louis] left to squeeze, and that she [Esther] wanted more money." Jean Starr, 64, testified that Untermeyer had told her: "[Esther] has threatened to bring the temple down about my ears the way Delilah did with Samson." As well as any man could, Untermeyer summed up the situation: "I admit that my whole state of mind is one of confusion."

A gossip column report that "Father Divine's white wife has had enough" got an immediate, indignant denial. Said blonde Mother Divine: "An ugly, ridiculous statement . . . Winchell and those of his type like to print erroneous statements to undermine the faith and belief people have in Father Divine."

Ex-Mayor of Boston James M. Curley, 75, pardoned recently by President Truman (he spent five months in jail for mail fraud in 1947), was back in "God's country--Boston," after an extensive tour of Europe. Swinging a blackthorn shillelagh, Democrat Curley announced that he would be a candidate next year for a fifth term as mayor of Boston. About that fraud conviction? "Probably just a case of Mr. Roosevelt wanting to smear me."

Words & Music

The Metropolitan Opera's pretty Coloratura Mimi Benzell, 26, caused a few lowbrow eyebrows to rise when, in a Hollywood nightclub, she unexpectedly gave the customers some lowdown blues and a couple of ladylike bumps. Said she: "I'm making a lot of people like opera that never could stand it before."

From Paris, word leaked out that onetime Wonder Boy Orson Welles, 35, was working on a new play called The Unthinking Lobster. It would be a take-off on movie people with all the characters easily recognizable, according to Variety, and "likely not to endear Welles with Hollywood ..."

Crusading for the "fully charged" reality of poetic drama, British Poet-Playwright Christopher (The Lady's Not for Burning) Fry warned a BBC audience not to expect him to be impartial: "Any playwright is laying his own world like an egg in the nest of the theater, and he is deeply concerned in hatching it."

Roses & Thorns

When her hotel presented a $225.20 bill and refused to accept her check, onetime bestselling Novelist Ursula (ExWife) Parrott, 48, spent 30 hours in the Sussex County (Delaware) jail with her French poodle, Coco. "This sort of publicity is bad for a writer," complained Author Parrott. "A writer isn't like an actress, you know."

Broadway's trumpet-voiced Ethel Merman, who will play a party-throwing lady diplomat in a forthcoming musical (Call Me Madam), showed up an hour and 40 minutes late for a dinner engagement with party-throwing Perle Mesta, U.S. Minister to Luxembourg. Reported Ethel afterwards: "We wound up with our arms around each other, yak-yaking to beat the band. A real swell dame."

An old argument flared up again. The president of the Seville Royal Academy of Belles Lettres announced that he had "historical proof" that bones newly discovered in a Carthusian monastery were those of Christopher Columbus. The announcement was received with cold disbelief by the custodians of Columbus' white marble mausoleum in Ciudad Trujillo, Santo Domingo, which claims to have the remains of the discoverer.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury was photographed presenting the Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, pro-Communist "Red Dean" of Canterbury, to Princess Margaret (see cut), the conservative Daily Mail fumed: "Let us look behind these smiling figures. One of them is a church dignitary who has identified himself with a regime which is out to destroy both religion and royalty ... the supporter of a system which proclaims that religion is 'the opiate of the people' ... It may be said with perverse pride, 'This could only happen in England.' But should it happen in England?"

* Untermeyer once described her as "a shrewd attorney of dominating personality, whose tender emotions never ran away with her abiding sense of double-entry bookkeeping."

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