To Have & Have Not

In Beverly Hills, Calif., Cinemactress Jennifer Jones and Producer David O. Selznick, who were married in July 1949, finally got around to taking inventory of their wedding presents. Then they hastily called the police to report the theft of a pair of covered silver dishes and a tray worth $2,000, but had to admit they had no idea when the theft might have happened.

Oldtime Heavyweight Champion James J. Jeffries slapped a $150,000 slander suit against two small-time promoters for advertising a bingo-type game called "Conflict" played in "Jeffries' Barn" on his Burbank, Calif, ranch. Such goings-on, 75-year-old Jim Jeffries charged, would hurt his "good name."

The Bank of America filed an involuntary petition in bankruptcy in Hollywood against Producer Walter (Joan of Arc) Wanger, after it tried and failed to collect a loan of $178,476.43 advanced to help make Reckless Moment, a new picture starring James Mason and Wanger's wife, Joan Bennett.

Frances ("Peaches") Browning, 40, tabloid-touted child-bride of the '205, got special mention in the will of her third husband, the late Joseph Civelli, San Francisco department-store executive, who left an estate of some $50,000. Wrote Civelli in his will: "It is my specific intention . . . to disinherit her completely."

The Strenuous Life

A sober crowd of faithful followers made its way to Medicine Lodge, Kans. (pop. 2,290), to dedicate a brick and frame house as a W.C.T.U. memorial. It was the old home of Carry Nation, and furnished with her original bar-smashing hatchet, the satchel in which she carried bricks to bash in saloon mirrors and glasses, her old rocking chair and desk, and a life-sized portrait of the woman who also once urged Britons to give up their intemperate habit of drinking tea.

In the charity ward of San Francisco Hospital last week a reporter found a wasted, melancholy man who had once tootled with the top jazz men in the land. Now, his money all spent, his liver almost gone from years of lost weekends, famed Hot Clarinetist "Pee Wee" Russell still had "a chance to live," the doctors said.

In a Manhattan court, Mrs. Evyleen R. Cronin, 58, onetime secretary-companion and maid to Tallulah Bankhead, was charged with stealing more than $4,000 from her former employer by raising and forging checks. The money was used, cried the defendant's lawyer, to buy things for Miss Bankhead--"Cocaine, marijuana, liquor, booze, whisky, champagne and sex." Retorted outraged lava-voiced Tallulah: "Of course I drink. But nobody has to kite checks to pay for my liquor." As for dope: "Even if I had been getting it--which I certainly wasn't--do you think I'd have been paying for it by check?" But what made Actress Bankhead angriest was the mention of sex. Rumbled she: "God knows I never have had to buy sex."

It was no gag, said the country's gagwriters, but a serious vote for the "ten top laugh provokers of the year." Among the winners: Vice President Alben W. Berkley (public life); Jimmy Durante (TV); Ethel (Call Me Madam) Merman (stage); S. J. (Swiss Family Perelman) Perelman (literature); and, in the field of business, bumptious Manhattan Saloonkeeper Bernard ("Toots") Shor.

Friends announced that Siam's Massachusetts-born, music-writing King Phumi-phon, 23, and Queen Sirikit, 18, were looking forward to a royal heir "in June or July."

In Manhattan on business, pert Perfume-Maker Mile. Gabrielle ("No. 5") Chanel, sixtyish, had a tip for American women: "Age is no matter. You can be ravishing at 20, charming at 40, and irresistible the rest of your life."

The Wide-Open Spaces

In San Antonio, General Jonathan M. ("Skinny") Wainwright returned from a party to find that burglars had ransacked his house, dumped out desks and drawers, pried open the doors of a valuable gun collection, walked off with nothing more than two pairs of his white kid gloves.

Back on his ranch at Sonoita, near Tucson, former U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's Lewis Douglas, boss of one cowhand, a string of horses and 400 head of cattle, felt well enough to take on a community job. Cattle-raising neighbors elected him chairman of their rainmaking committee, then hired a California rainmaker to help break the drought.

With his new Beverly Hills real-estate business a going concern, former Heavyweight Champ Jack Dempsey looked around for another investment, teamed up with Cinemactor John (Sands of Iwo Jima) Wayne and Crooning Cowboy Gene Autry for some wildcat oil drilling in New Mexico's San Juan Basin.

Arriving in Melbourne with her Aussie bridegroom, brilliant, brisk Author Barbara (Policy for the West) Ward, 36, a former governor of the British Broadcasting Corp., had a compliment of a kind for the country. Said she: "Australia is lucky to have no television. I hope you go a long time without television. Civilized people don't need it."

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