Fighting Men Singing Cinecowboy Gene Autry enlisted in the Army Air Corps, passed his physical examination, expected active duty soon.

James Stewart, who quit films for the Army more than a year ago, was promoted to first lieutenant in the Air Corps.

Promoted to second lieutenant in the Air Corps was Actor Burgess Meredith.

Irwin Shaw, short story writer, playwright (1936's anti-war Bury the Dead}, passed his physical examination and was sworn in as a private in the Army.

Off & On After the longest-drawn-out casting to-do since Gone With the Wind, the juicy role of Maria in the forthcoming cine-version of For Whom the Bell Tolls went to dancing Musicomedienne Vera Zorina (born Eva Brigitta Hartwig). "Her hair . . . was but little longer than the fur on a beaver pelt," wrote Ernest Hemingway of his heroine, so off came the dancer's ash-blonde glory.

The case of Fredric March was something else again. Silvery glory went to his head, to his upper lip, to his eyebrows, transformed him into the most reasonable facsimile of Samuel Langhorne Clemens this side of Mark Twain.

Memory Book Briefly revived was one of the tabloid sensations of the '20s--the case of the late Long Island blueblood Leonard Kip Rhinelander and his Negro wife, Alice Jones. Rhinelander, claiming that she had represented herself as white, sued for annulment a month after their marriage in 1924, lost his case, got a Nevada divorce in 1929. She got an agreement from Rhinelander and his father to pay her $3,600 a year for life. The father continued the payments after the son's death in 1936, but after the father's death in 1940 the payments stopped, and Alice took the matter to the courts. An appellate court last week called the original agreement illegal and threw out her claim against the estate.

Arrested in Brooklyn, N.Y., for annoying a woman in a subway, one Willie Roberson was discovered to be one of the Scottsboro boys. He was convicted of disorderly conduct, given 90 days in the workhouse.

William S. Hart, lantern-jawed hero of the pioneer horse-operas, battled three grass and timber fires that nearly destroyed his 300-acre ranch in Newhall, Calif. Outbuildings, some 3,000 trees, and all the grass on the land were burned.

The willow that had long leaned over the tomb of Poet Alfred de Musset in Paris' Pere-Lachaise cemetery crashed in a windstorm, fell against the tomb, broke the bust of the poet who had loved willows, and shattered the marble tablet bearing his verses that begin: "Mes chers amis, quand je mourrai, Plantez un laule au cimetiere. . ."*

Digging Sold by the town of Newport, R.I. for $11,370.64 in back taxes plus a dollar was Evalyn Walsh McLean's villa, "By-the-Sea." James O'Donnell, operator of a chain of Washington drugstores, got it for less than one-tenth of its assessed valuation. Mrs. McLean has not used it for years. Mrs. Herbert Shipman's mansion across the street, built at a cost of some $1,000,000, went begging at the same sale. Taxes due: $12,366.33. Now it belongs to Newport.

* "Dear friends, when I am dead plant me a willow in the graveyard. . ."

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