Family Reunions

Dorothy Arnold, sometime actress who divorced Joe DiMaggio in 1944, was worried. Joe and their nine-year-old son, Joe Jr., had been seen frolicking at Hollywood's flossy Bel Air Hotel swimming pool--and Joe's friend, luscious Cinemactress Marilyn (Clash by Night) Monroe, was also there in the unlikely role of young Joe's governess. Dorothy went to court to ask that Joe be ordered to stop taking the boy to places that are long on liquor, short on other children. Marilyn merely said: "I want to love and be loved more than anything else in the world."

In Manhattan, Comic Henry Morgan, who two years ago was vaguely linked with subversive organizations by the publication Red Channels, admitted that his jokes have sold more & more badly since then. His regular income has dived from $8,250 a week to the mere $45 he now gets for writing a newspaper column. Obviously, claimed Henry in court, he can no longer pay $150-a-week temporary alimony to his estranged wife Isobel. The judge saw it Henry's way, ordered Isobel's weekly stipend cut to $50.

Sitting down to a breakfast of two boiled eggs with some Communist cronies somewhere in China, the Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, Britain's white-eaved "Red Dean" of Canterbury, told his delighted friends about capitalist misery back home. "In England we never see eggs," he chortled. "I see here you have plenty."

New Directions

Touring England in George Bernard Shaw's The Millionairess, Actress Katharine Hepburn got an invitation in New-castle-on-Tyne to step out with 350 visiting sailors from two U.S. destroyers. Resourcefully she barred all visitors to her hotel room, had her phone disconnected, rushed straight back into seclusion after the show. Later she explained: "I fear no man. I hate being crowded by people, and sailors are people."

Boston's Radio Station WBMS announced an eloquent addition to its staff: James M. Curley, 77, four-time Boston mayor, sometime Massachusetts governor, congressman and convict (using the mails to defraud). Curley's contract specifies that he may talk about anything during his hour-long program, three times a week, but must not be called a "disk jockey."

Five federal judges decided that Novelist Kathleen Winsor is no novelist, thus bearing out the literary critics who always claimed that Forever Amber, her lusty epic of Restoration England, is no novel. The question before the court: should the $165,000 Kathleen got for movie rights to Amber be taxed as author's income or, at a lower rate, as a non-author's capital gain? The judges' ruling: "The book was written . . . primarily because she enjoyed" it, not with a publication "purpose in mind." To Capital-Gainer Winsor and former husband (No. 1 of three) Robert Herwig, the court awarded a 1945 tax refund of $26,358.72 each.

On a Manhattan TV show, two Metropolitan Opera stars, Baritone Robert Merrill, 33, and Soprano Roberta Peters, 21, who were married on March 30, achieved some close harmony in the romantic Sweethearts duet from Victor Herbert's operetta. Five days later they signed legal separation papers. Soprano Peters' claim: incompatibility.

Just so he could show the boys he had not lost his touch, A.F.L. Musician Boss James Caesar Petrillo warmed up for their convention next week in Santa Barbara, Calif, by rattling a solo on a Latin American guiro a notched gourd that rasps when rubbed with a stubby baton.

The Chosen Ones

At an Oakland (Calif.) Chamber of Commerce dinner, France's Minister Plenipotentiary Roger Seydoux hailed Manufacturer Henry J. Kaiser as "the symbol of the industrialization of the West," awarded him the ribbons of a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.

Britain's public-opinion pollster, Mass Observation, asked 200 Londoners-in-the-street whose death, among six late celebrities (not including King George VI), had most grieved them. Their greatest loss: Britain's idolized Radio Comedian Tommy Handley. Runner-up: Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sixth place: George Bernard Shaw.

Although nobody would say who had commissioned it, a bust of Harry Truman, the work of Finnish Sculptor Kalervo Kallio, went on exhibit at Washington's Smithsonian Institution. But in Rochester, N.Y. the President looked more like a boon than a bust to National Retail Clothiers and Furnishers President Ben Projan, who proposed that, if he ever leaves the White House, ex-Haberdasher Truman should be named czar of the squabblesome U.S. men's clothing industry.

After Due Consideration

When a Washington society reporter hopefully asked her if there was any chance that she might be married before next Inauguration Day, Margaret Truman replied flatly that there will be no White House wedding. "You can rest easy on that," said she.

Cinemactress Gloria Grahame, who has played many a bad girl on the screen, suggested that most U.S. girls are too proper to give Dr. Alfred Kinsey much help in researching his book on the sexual behavior of the human female. Noting that the new work is already two years behind schedule, Gloria added: "It's a matter of convention. Women . . . simply do not discuss sex . . . except when it applies to someone else."

Reminded that his brother James had endorsed Kefouver and that his brother John was for Eisenhower, Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., chairman of Averell Harriman's national campaign committee, was asked by a reporter about the choice of brother Elliott, who is in Cuba. Retorted Franklin brightly: "Batista, I guess." Then he modestly added: "I don't think it makes much difference to the public whom the Roosevelt boys are for."

Old (48) Crooner Bing Crosby made a low bow to his youthful rivals: "The kids don't buy my records so much any more. They like the new ones who holler . . . The nervous strain Johnnie Ray must go through . . . After show time I'd be ready to go to the hospital."

While Ingrid Bergman awaited the birth of Roberto Rossellini's twins in Rome, her lawyers petitioned a California court to permit her daughter Pia to visit her in Italy. In her affidavit, Ingrid charged that Pia's father, Dr. Peter Lindstrom, "told me it delighted him to see me cry and suffer." Spluttered the doctor: "I don't want the child exposed to Rossellini. He ran away with the mother of my child. He seems to have a habit of living with mistresses while married to someone else. It has been quoted in the United States Senate that he is a drug addict. . ." From Rome, Rossellini shot off an outraged message to the Los Angeles judge, demanded a chance to counter Lindstrom's "calumnies." The judge gave the Italian director until June 20 or until all the case's evidence is in (whichever is later) to come to the U.S. and speak his piece. Rossellini's only problem now is persuading U.S. immigration officials to give him an entrance visa.

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