Said Monologuist Cornelia Otis Skinner, interviewed in New Orleans: "Hollywood is cheap, it's tawdry, it's wicked. The people in power are so horrible that my friends, men and women who speak my language, are miserably unhappy there."

Said Father Charles Edward Coughlin, broadcasting from Detroit's Shrine of the Little Flower day after repeal of the U. S. arms embargo became law: "It is my opinion that now we are virtually at war with Germany. . . ."

Viewing with alarm the financial situation of endowed U. S. universities, University of Chicago's President Robert Maynard Hutchins proposed radical remedies: 1) that competing universities merge, 2) that they divvy up the fields of advanced study to prevent duplication, 3) that they stop trying to live on their incomes, begin to live on their capital.

Elected president of the National Association of Performing Artists, an organization of musicians to protect their work against unauthorized recording, was James John ("Jimmie") Walker, ex-Mayor of New York City, ex-composer (Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?). Keynoted talented Artist Walker: "This organization is . . . determined to eradicate the practice of highjacking the talents of American artists."

Composer Rudolph Friml told a Manhattan newshawk of a "conversation" he had had with the late Victor Herbert via the Ouija board: "He says to me, 'Play five notes.'. . . I play. . . . It is Victor Herbert. It is his style exactly. Then Victor Herbert he says to me, 'Quite charming.'

On British casualty lists was Actor Leslie Howard, 46, victim of an automobile accident in a London blackout. Actor Howard's injuries included a fractured jaw, three broken front teeth, unspecified damages to brow and chest.

Five Harvard students, four named Murphy, one Murphey, received $360 each from a scholarship fund established in 1916 by William Stanislaus Murphy, Harvard '85, for the "collegiate education of men of the name of Murphy." The college announced that for them a Murphey was as good as a Murphy.

More uncertain than at any time since World War II began was the welfare of he Hon. Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford, blonde British Naziphile. When war broke, she was stranded in Munich beyond closed frontiers (TIME, Sept. 18). Since then various reports have trickled out of Germany: that Miss Mitford had quarreled with her admirer, Adolf Hitler, had attempted to commit suicide by overdosing herself with sleeping potion (which Berlin denied), that she had had a severe attack of double pneumonia and was confined to a Munich nursing home. Latest bulletin: from Russian Prince Nicholas Orloff, quoted last week in the London Sunday Dispatch, that she shot herself in Munich the day France and England declared war. Said Prince Nicholas: "The doctors expressed little hope . . . I believe she is dead."

Asked in a Los Angeles interview why opera had never been cinemadapted, well-fed Kirsten Flagstad replied: "We opera singers don't look very well. We would not look nice in close-ups."

Dour, dictatorial Frank Hague, Mayor of Jersey City (see p. 73) told approving Jersey Citizens that as a boy he broke the law "thousands of times." Some of the crimes he admitted: stealing apples, breaking windows, playing hookey. He repeated the retort he made to an aid who said boys should be punished for such doings: "Why, Doctor, I done that when I was a boy . . . I know that is a, natural thing for boys to do in the poor sections of the city where they haven't got anything else to do."

Gone abegging was the 1939 Nobel Prize for physiological medicine intended for brilliant, egg-domed Professor Gerhard Domagk for his research in chemical therapy in Elberfeld Germany (TIME, Nov. 6). He regretfully wrote to the Nobel Prize Committee, saying that the German ban against accepting Nobel Prizes (imposed when the 1935 Peace Prize was given to imprisoned German Carl von Ossietzky) would prevent him from taking $40,000, which is more than a German professor can now earn in 25 years.

In a Copenhagen streetcar a passenger stared at a straphanging couple, suddenly bellowed: "I think it's a shame this country's future king and queen have to stand up!" Sitters snapped to their feet, offered every seat to embarrassed Crown Prince Frederick and Crown Princess Ingrid who, like all patriotic, car-owning Danes were using trams to conserve gasoline.

A reporter on the London Daily Express remembered a chat he had had before the war with Danzig's Nazi Chief of State Albert Forster, who said at the time: "When I was in London last year the man who really impressed me was Churchill. I told Hitler about him. Hitler agreed with me. 'Yes,' he said, 'he is the greatest leader England has. He is a man of courage, energy, vision, security. What a pity he is against us.'"

Denied to Automogul Henry Ford, who loves to surround himself with old relics, was Michigan automobile license number 999. The number had long been on the plates of his personal car as a souvenir of the Ford racer that Barney Oldfield pushed faster than 60 m.p.h. in 1903. A new Michigan ruling provides that license numbers start at 1001.

Emile Herzog, better known as Andre Maurois, French Academy Immortal, able biographer (Shelley, Byron), Anglophile, again occupied as an interpreter for the British armies in France, sought to drop his German-Jewish name in favor of his professional pseudonym.

In Rome a communique announced: "Her Royal Highness the Princess of Piedmont [wife of Crown Prince Umberto, sister of King Leopold of the Belgians] has happily completed her fifth month of pregnancy." Prideful, Rome's Tribuna commented: "Our people, prolific and fertile, welcome this happy announcement with a sense of reverent homage. . . ."

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