The Family Circle

At his office in Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria, Herbert Hoover, 76, got the news that he was a great-grandfather for the third time.

In Hollywood, when she heard the news that she was a grandmother, Stage & Screen Star Mary Astor, 44, said: "I feel young again now."

Ingrid Bergman announced that husband Roberto Rossellini would be on hand to join the family reunion in Paris this month when she meets her twelve-year-old daughter, Pia, and former husband Dr. Peter Lindstrom.

Fun-loving, wife-mauling John D. Spreckels III, heir to sugar millions, faced up to getting a new sparring partner.

Fourth wife Margaret Lee, "in fear of my life," filed for divorce in Los Angeles.

In Santa Monica, Conductor-Composer Ferde (Grand Canyon Suite) Grofe and wife Ruth drew up a property settlement for divorce after 21 years of marriage, two children. She will charge mental cruelty.

After several weeks of fighting legal brambles tossed about by fourth husband Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, Five & Dime Heiress Barbara Hutton gave up on a quick and easy Mexican divorce. She flew to Manhattan, where she announced she was "in no hurry at all," denied she had offered her husband a financial settlement. ". . . The money was my grandpa's, and I have no right to throw it away."

High Authority

Hundreds of eager women flocked to a San Francisco theater to see and hear Hearstling Igor ("Cholly Knickerbocker") Cassini lecture. Igor explained his difficulties as a society reporter: "My job is more taxing, even, than the job of a Hollywood, political, or canasta columnist ... I am a lawyer, priest, father confessor, investigator and reporter." Turning to their papers, Igor's readers could see what he meant. He had set himself the task of listing the world's "ten worst-dressed women," including Rita Hayworth and Evita Peron ("overdressed"), Princess Elizabeth ("shapeless, matronly clothes that make her look years older"), Margaret Truman (whose"clothes always look as if they came from a small Midwestern emporium") and Cinemactress Paulette Goddard ("wild colors and too many accessories").

Lady Iris Mountbatten, who arrived in the U.S. in 1946 and made headlines the following year by cashing checks that temporarily exceeded her bank balance, announced in Manhattan that she had written a song, Once I Lost My Way. The tune, she said, "has been bothering me for three years."

In London, publishers of Britain's knightly blue book, Debrett's Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Companion-age, announced that their next year's edition will list American names for the first time. Included will be Generals James Doolittle, Walter Bedell Smith, Carl Spaatz, Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur and another 100-odd Americans who hold honorary British knighthoods (Order of the British Empire, the Order of the Bath, the Order of St. Michael and St. George).

Part of the Pittsburgh Pirates' spring training, wrote a United Press reporter from San Bernardino, Calif., was a lecture from Manager Branch Rickey, referring to his bachelor players as "matrimonial cowards," and urging them "to marry and take this step to heaven." Rickey promptly roared that he had been misquoted: "I know many boys who got married and went plumb straight to hell. I don't believe a man ought to get married unless he cannot help it. I mean to say ... a man who gets married without being wild about the girl is just a plain fool."

Rewards & Returns

To his old nursemaid, Charlotte ("Lalla") Bill, now 77 and retired, King George VI offered his "Grace and Favor": a yellow stone cottage on his Sandringham estate where she may live, rent free, for the rest of her life. Settled in the cottage this week, surrounded by photographs of Queen Victoria and six generations of the British royal family, Lalla recalled her charges: "They were real boys, up to anything, the best any nanny would wish for."

The British government announced that George Bernard Shaw's fussy old Victorian house at Ayot St. Lawrence would be kept as a national shrine. Housekeeper Alice Laden promised to keep everything just as Shaw left it, including his prized photographs of Gandhi, Lenin, Stalin and Ibsen, which line the dining room mantelpiece.

Some British moppets will soon be leaving for a holiday in Switzerland. A Swiss editor recently printed a reproduction of one of Winston Churchill's copyrighted paintings and sent off a check for -L-2. "the usual fee paid to Swiss artists." An answer came from Churchill's lawyers: "insufficient." The editor then offered to pay Churchill -L-200 if he would use the money to give underprivileged youngsters a Swiss holiday. Churchill agreed.

In London, the National Union of Protestants, which objected strongly to Princess Margaret's informal audience in 1949 with Pope Pius XII, feared that Princess Elizabeth might also visit the Vatican on her spring trip to Rome. To do so, cried the National Union, would be "unconstitutional . . . dangerous to the safety of the British Empire."

His Soviet masters apparently decided that Composer Sergei Prokofiev was gradually getting back into tune, awarded him a Stalin Prize (2nd class) for a couple of pieces of music called Winter Bonfire and On Guard of Peace.

In Bayonne, N.J., with appropriate ruffles and flourishes, Connecticut's handsome Governor John Lodge was piped aboard the 33,000-ton carrier Tarawa, officially "adopted" the ship in the name of his state,* and announced that a Citizens' Committee had been set up to play the part of friends to the ship's officers and crew.

After almost six years' absence, a ubiquitous fighting man was back in France. Carpenters, working on General Eisenhower's new headquarters near Paris, arrived on the job one morning last week to find freshly scribbled signs with the news that "Kilroy was here."

* The ship's name will not be changed. By naval custom, only battleships--a vanishing class--are named after states.

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