Monday, Oct. 26, 1959
Born. To Slapstick Comic Jerry Lewis, 33, cinemaniac (Don't Give Up the Ship), toastmaster and song gargler (Big Songs for Little People), and Patti Lewis, 35: a fifth son, fifth child; in Santa Monica, Calif. Name: Anthony Joseph. Weight: 6 lbs. 11 oz.
Married. Kate Roosevelt, 23, granddaughter of F.D.R., daughter of California Congressman James Roosevelt and Betsy Gushing Roosevelt Whitney, adopted daughter of John Hay Whitney, U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's and publisher of the New York Herald Tribune; and William Haddad, 31, crusading, prizewinning New York Post reporter; in Manhattan.
Married. Monte Blue, 72, matinee idol of silent films (So This Is Paris, White Shadows of the South Seas), more recently a bit player in movies and TV; and Portrait Painter Betty Munson Mess, 42, widowed mother of four children; both for the third time; in Los Angeles.
Divorced. Ex-Marine Colonel Gregory ("Pappy") Boyington, 46, rambunctious Medal of Honor flying ace (28 Japanese planes), reformed tosspot and bestselling autobiographer (Baa Baa Black Sheep); by Frances Baker Boyington, 45; after 13 years of marriage, no children; in Los Angeles.
Died. Cinemactor Errol (Captain Blood) Flynn, 50; of a heart attack; in Vancouver, B.C. A carefree hedonist who recently described himself as a man who had "seen everything twice," he was a sort of U.S. saloonfolk hero to movie fans who once made him one of the ten biggest box-office draws. Born in Tasmania, where his zoologist father, an Australian, was a lecturer at the University of Tasmania, Flynn, blessed with quicksilver wit and a steel physique, was a glass-jawed boxer with a good right, a global Jack-of-all-trades, and a freebooting South Sea sailor before his congenital charm infected Hollywood, where he never learned to act. By his own estimate, he made $7,000,000 in movies ("just for swinging a sword, sitting on a horse and yelling, 'Charge!' "), and riotously squandered it as it came. The greatest concession he made to convention was to marry three times, and each union went out the window along with his roving eye. His taste for young flesh led to three statutory rape scandals, plus a juicy paternity suit--but the older he got, the more he seemed a cardboard sinner. Finally a bloated travesty of his younger self, he was typecast in his last three films as a drunk, and his forthcoming autobiography is called My Wicked, Wicked Ways.
Died. Elliott White Springs, 63, fun-loving textile magnate, author and World War I flying ace; of cancer of the pancreas ; in Manhattan. After bagging twelve German planes and winding up the war as the U.S.'s fourth-ranking ace (after Eddie Rickenbacker, Frank Luke and George Vaughn), Springs could not cotton to settling down at work in the family cotton mills in South Carolina. He flitted off to Paris, ground out a bestselling Warbirds tale of his flying exploits, plus ten other books and many magazine articles. He came back to the mills in 1928, eventually earned about $250,000 from his writing. He consolidated the family properties, made good cloth, built the Springs Cotton Mills into the nation's third biggest textile maker. He made his mills represent the ultimate in good employee relations (swimming pools for the 13,000 workers, a beach resort, free junkets), his product the most racily advertised in the staid textile world. His most famed ad, captioned by himself and duly noted by the U.S. Post Office: a smiling Indian squaw rocking a tired brave in a bedsheet hammock, with the legend, "A buck well spent on a Springmaid sheet."
Died. General of the Army George Catlett Marshall, 78; after several strokes and long illness; in Washington (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).
Died. S. (for Samuel) Palmer Gaillard, 103, oldest member of the American Bar Association, a practicing lawyer for 78 years; in Mobile, Ala.
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