Madam Minister's No. 3

Last month in Copenhagen, a newshawk cornered Mrs. Ruth Bryan Owen, U. S. Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Denmark and Iceland, just before that gracious lady set sail for the U. S. to stump for Franklin D. Roosevelt's reelection. Did she not think, he asked, that it would be disagreeable for any husband to be of lower rank than his wife? "I can see no problems," countered William Jennings Bryan's 50-year-old daughter. "The food tastes equally good at both ends of the table."

Last week Washington newshawks discovered the import of this exchange when Madam Minister Owen joyfully confirmed reports that she was about to marry for the third time. Husband No. 3 was to be Captain Boerge Rohde, tall, flaxen-haired member of King Christian's Life Guards. Kammerjunker (Gentleman-in-Waiting) Kaptajn Rohde, his fiancee confided, was 42, musically inclined, a graceful dancer, a man of wit & humor. They had met at His Majesty's New Year's Eve court ball seven months ago. In 1903 Ruth Bryan married a U. S. artist named William Homer Leavitt, bore him two children before divorcing him in 1909. Next year her marriage to Major Reginald Altham Owen of Britain's Royal Engineers automatically cost her her U. S. citizenship. When she tried to regain it in 1921, after she and her ailing husband had settled in Florida, she found that she would have to be naturalized like any other foreigner. Feminists used her plight as a prime argument in securing passage of the Cable Act of 1922. which provided that a U. S. woman married to a foreigner could retain citizenship unless she lived as long as two years continuously in her husband's country or five years outside the U. S. After her husband's death in 1927 Mrs. Owen went to Washington for two terms in the House. In 1933 President Roosevelt made her the first woman to represent the U. S. at a foreign capital. Speculation centered last week on the social difficulties of the bride's prospective position in Copenhagen as U. S. Minister and wife of a Danish subject. Unless it proposed to separate husband & wife at court dinners, the Danish Foreign Office would apparently have to choose between insulting the U. S. by seating its representative as Kammerjunkerinde, or insulting the envoys of other nations by seating the Kammerjunker above them. Minister Owen soon solved this diplomatic stickler to her own satisfaction by announcing that in her professional life she would continue to be Ruth Bryan Owen.

Clad in a grey suit and raspberry shirt which he wore all the way over, Captain Rohde arrived in New York Harbor last week, shouted unintelligible greetings from his ship when Mrs. Owen put-putted out to meet him at Quarantine in the cabin cruiser of her son-in-law, Robert Lehman, cousin of New York's Governor. Robbed of an interview, newshawks canvassed his shipmates, received glowing accounts of the Captain. So clean was the ship, he had reported to them, that he had not had to change his collar for three days. He won the deck-tennis championship with a pretty, 20-year-old Swedish girl. He told his fellow-passengers that when, in Amaliegade, he led the King's Guard past the U. S. Legation, he had had the band play U. S. tunes. Declared a steward: "I think he should make a very good husband." At week's end Madam Minister Owen and Captain Rohde motored to Hyde Park, N. Y., where the Captain changed his collar for his dark blue-tunicked. pale blue-trousered dress uniform. In St. James Episcopal Church, Rev. Dr. Samuel Moor Shoemaker Jr., an Oxford Grouper, married them under the beaming smile of John Bryan, second of Mrs. Owen's four children, President & Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt. After supping with the Roosevelts at their Hyde Park cottage, the U. S. Minister to Denmark & husband headed for Niagara Falls on their honeymoon.

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