The War of the Roses

One month before their divorce case could reach the comparative dignity of the courts, Billy Rose and Eleanor Holm began throwing mudpie bulletins at one another in public.* Last week their latest volley of press releases gave Manhattan's joyful tabloids the best copy of the whole hot summer. Billy Rose himself, the unco-smart little bashaw of Broadway, called it "trial by newspaper."

It's a Phony! The first mudpie was hurled by an old friend of the family, Dorothy Wesley Bernie, widow of Ben ("The Old Maestro") Bernie and matron of honor at the Rose wedding 13 years ago. In California she filed a suit for criminal libel against Billy, and swore out a warrant for his arrest if he ever set foot in the state. Her charge: Rose was passing around an affidavit from her onetime Negro maid, Alberta Jones, that contained obscene, "horrible lies" about sex orgies that supposedly took place in Mrs. Bernie's home and involved her, Eleanor, and an unidentified girl called "Trudy." The affidavit, said Mrs. Bernie, was a phony; furthermore, Rose had bribed the maid to get it.

Showman Rose forthwith called a press conference in his plush office overlooking the stage of the Ziegfeld Theater. More than 20 newsmen responded. Billy opened by saying he was "stunned and bewildered." He had never intended to make that dirty affidavit public, he said, because he knew he could win his case without those "obscenities." It was Mrs. Bernie who had made the affidavit public property by filing her charge against him.

The fact was, said Billy, that "it was only after the case got into the newspapers and [Eleanor] filed 150 pages of affidavits charging me with everything from smuggling Chinamen to raising marijuana on my window sill that I decided to take a look at the pretty pot that was calling the kettle black ... I refuse to get bitter about [Eleanor], and I never suspected any extracurricular activity on the part of my wife. But her behavior was enough to make a strong man weep. My marriage ended seven years ago." (He was locked out of their house in October.) Since then, he said, "she has been my wife in name only." Billy recalled that he offered her a "generous" cash settlement and "an equally generous sum of alimony," even though it was less than the temporary $700 a week she is getting now by court order.

He's a Tightwad! Next day Eleanor heaved an answering pie, a press release given out by the office of her lawyer, Louis Nizer.* Said Eleanor: "Those who have dealt with Mr. Rose throughout the years well know whether it is his clenched fist on a dollar or my alleged avarice which is responsible for the impasse . . . If he wants to find his real enemy, he need only look in the mirror . . . His present offer not to use his fraudulent affidavit, which has already been filed and communicated to all sorts of people, is like the act of a man who shoots somebody and then is willing to throw away the gun."

She also reminded the public what a faithful wife she had been during Rose's trouble with Showgirl Joyce Mathews. "When Billy called me because he was in trouble when the police found Joyce Mathews in his penthouse trying to commit suicide, I rushed to him and protected him." At the time, Rose had told his public: "Now is the time to have a wife." Eleanor now charges that he had "later betrayed me again and again."

Meanwhile, Hearst's Journal-American interviewed Mrs. Bernie by phone and broke out an "exclusive": BERNIE WIDOW CALLS ROSE'S STORY 'LIES.' Mrs. Bernie, said the Journal, wanted to remind Billy of his days as a syndicated columnist. Then Eleanor was the model of a faithful wife and often the star of his column. "Billy knows as well as I do that Eleanor is a fine girl. She was a wonderful wife and he told everybody how great she was. He wrote it in his columns . . . and he knows she is still the same girl."

To this, Rose mockingly turned the other cheek. Said he: "Let's make everybody happy. I fully concede that Eleanor is the finest woman since Florence Nightingale; that Wes Bernie is a road-company Joan of Arc; that Louis Nizer, Eleanor's attorney, is president of the Sweet Fellows Club; that Alberta Jones has astigmatism, and it must have been three other people. And finally that Billy Rose has horns and hooves and ought to be ground up for hamburger."

Cut-Rale Seamstresses! Then, as if prompted by Mrs. Bernie's reminder of his columnar days, Billy Rose sat down to write the best column of his life, and it was given free to all newspapers as follows:

"I see by the papers that Eleanor is accusing me of being a tightwad. She is absolutely right. Compared to me, Scrooge was a philanthropist. For instance, throughout our marriage we lived in a five-story town house on Beekman Place, with only one lousy elevator. The furniture was secondhand stuff--designed by Chippendale and other 18th century English carpenters. The old Crown Derby plates she ate off had occasional cracks, and the antique Paul Storr silver was once slobbered in by King George III. The pictures on the walls were horrors--the work of hacks like Rembrandt, Hals, Velasquez and Renoir.

"During the summer I made her rough it in a 30-room shack in Mt. Kisco. This estate had only one swimming pool, only one tennis court, and a private movie theater with only one operator. On our private golf range, Eleanor had to play with repainted balls. When it came to servants I really put my foot down. I refused to hire more than one butler, one cook and three maids. What's even worse, Eleanor had only one personal maid and one personal laundress. She got only $17,000 pocket money a year . . . Her clothes were mostly rags stitched together by cut-rate seamstresses like Hattie Carnegie and Valentina . . . She had only 113 pairs of shoes, 41 sweaters, and eleven ratty-looking fur coats. At no time did I ever buy her an $80,000 sable.

"When it came to jewelry, it was all last season's stuff--92 different pieces which contained somewhat less than 200 carats of blue-white diamonds. When she asked me to buy the Hope diamond, I touted her off by telling her it was bad luck . . . When we split up, she was virtually destitute--$163,000 in cash and Government bonds. It's plain as the price tag on a Tiffany necklace that Eleanor is right when she labels me a tightwad. We'd probably still be together if I had made some decent gesture like putting the Taj Mahal on ball bearings and rolling it into New York."

* Rose is suing for divorce on grounds of adultery. Eleanor, former Olympic swimming star, is suing for a separation.

* Who last week won a $2,000,000 settlement for the former wife of Tobacco Heir Richard J. Reynolds.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.