After a Parisian judge had failed to settle their differences, Actress Jacqueline Delubac started divorce proceedings against her husband, famed Actor-Author Sacha Guitry. Meanwhile, the theatre receipts almost doubled as they continued to make love to each other night after night in Un Monde Fou ("A Mad World").

Arriving in London with five baby giant pandas, first ever seen alive in Europe, bespectacled Floyd Tangier ("Ajax") Smith, onetime U. S. banker in China who turned big-game hunter, posed for pictures with one of them. He plans to sell some in London, take the rest to the U. S.*

Home to her mother at Los Gatos, Calif., after seven months of marriage, went Yaltah Menuhin Stix, 16, younger sister of Violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Husband William Stix, attorney for the National Labor Relations Board, said nothing. Mother Menuhin said Yaltah would remain in California until "the inclement weather is over."

As SEC began an investigation of the Coster-Musica scandal (TIME, Jan. 9), a perversion of Mother Goose went the rounds of Wall Street:

Old Mother-Hubbard went to the cupboard

To get her poor dog a bone;

When she got there the cupboard was

bare

--And what a surprise that was to Price, Waterhouse & Co.

Back in the U. S. after six months and ten days in Europe ("to save money in income tax"), Soprano Grace Moore defended her much-criticized curtsy to the Duchess of Windsor in Cannes last December: "She would have been a royal duchess long ago if she had not been an American. After all, she gave happiness and the courage of his convictions to one man, which is more than most women can do. She deserves a curtsy for that alone.''

Sitting on a piano at a party for Loyalist Spain in Washington, famed Writer & Wit Dorothy Parker nervously swore off humor: "I don't see how you can help being unhappy now. The humorist has never been happy, anyhow. Today he's whistling past worse graveyards to worse tunes. . . . If you had seen what I saw in Spain, you'd be serious too. And you'd be up on this piano, trying to help those people."

Famed Astrophysicist Sir James Jeans sounded off on pianists' "touch": "So far as single notes are concerned it does not matter how [a pianist] strikes the key, so long as he strikes it with the requisite degree of force. . . . The tone quality will be the same whether he strikes it with his fingers or even the end of his umbrella."

Informed by worried Hudson's Bay Co. officials that its charter, granted in 1670, requires the Company to present a visiting British monarch with two live elk and a pair of black beavers, King George VI agreed that on his visit next spring he would accept instead, two mounted elk heads, two beaver skins.

Last fall New York City's loquacious little Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was sued for $100,000 slander by one William Weidberg, 32. Brooklyn lawyer who charged that when he heckled the Mayor at a political rally, the Mayor called him a "ginmill bum." Last week a New York State Supreme Court decision dismissed the action, called the words "at their worst, merely abusive and ill-chosen."

*Meanwhile, officials of Chicago's Brookfield Zoo located Panda-Hunter Ruth Harkness, missing four months, in Darjeeling, India, ill and, so far, panda-less.

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