Family Scene

SCENE: The dining room at No. 10 Downing Street, London. TIME: Shortly after the zero hour of the American landing in North Africa. CHARACTERS: A few Churchills.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill has just broken the news of the landing in Africa, and is looking like a prime minister.

Sarah (his second eldest daughter): "Yes, I know all about it. I've been working on the air side of the operations for months."

Churchill (testily): "Why didn't you tell me you knew all about it?"

Sarah: "We were sworn to secrecy."

Churchill (parental): "I suppose you thought I didn't know anything about it. After all, I do hold a position of some importance in this country, and I know something about what is going on."

He resumes looking like a prime minister as the curtain carefully descends.

The Critic Abroad

In Chungking last week New York Times ex-Dramacritic Brooks Atkinson took time out from war corresponding to see a Chinese Hamlet. The audience arrived at 8. The theater was "cleared of trash left from the afternoon performance" by 8:30. The curtains parted at 9. The cast wore false noses in an attempt to look Occidental, acted to Handel's Largo and Beethoven's Minuet in G. At 11:15 the play was only half over, but Atkinson left because "the ricksha boys hate to go over the hill in the dead of the night." His verdict: "Not yet ready for Broadway."

In London, New York Pier aid Tribune ex-Critic Richard Watts Jr., now Dublin representative for OWI, saw Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, turned himself inside out. Recalling that "all of us" who saw the 1939 production in Manhattan thought the play "hopelessly outmoded," he now found it "one of the great comedies,""one of the incomparable things of the theater," recanted, declaring that in 1939 "we were absurdly wrong."

Headaches

An apprentice to snow-maned Architect Frank Lloyd Wright pleaded guilty in a Madison, Wis. court to refusing to appear for induction, got a period of grace from Federal Judge Patrick T. Stone to "think it over." The apprentice denied the teacher-architect had told his students to evade service by becoming conscientious objectors, but the judge had his suspicions. "I think you boys are living under a bad influence with that man Wright," said he. Up at his Spring Green colony Wright exclaimed: "I would no more dream of counseling my students against going to war than I would dream of influencing them to go to war."

Against best-selling Current Historian Pierre Van Paassen (Days of Our Years, That Day Alone), the Duke of Hamilton filed suit for $100,000 libel. Complaint of the Duke, on whose Scottish estate Rudolf Hess alighted in the spring of 1941, was that Van Paassen hinted the duke had expected his guest, had been "colluding with the enemies of his country."

Against veteran Boy-Wonder Orson Welles, the U.S. filed an income-tax lien for $31,285.92 allegedly owing from 1941.

Into Chicago, all set to cash in on her recent misfortune, tripped Kathryn Gregory (professionally, Amber D'Georg), the red-headed WAAC who got herself an "other than honorable" discharge by going absent without leave from Fort Des Moines and turning up present without clothes in a Des Moines burlesque hall (TIME, Dec. 14). But Chicago's showmen voted unanimously to keep her out of their shows, explained piously: "If Uncle Sam doesn't want her, we don't want her."

The Soldier's Life

Last April the portly, 63-year-old French General Henri Giraud mystified the world by escaping from the Nazi prison of Koenigstein. When the Allies swooped into North Africa--lo, Giraud! How he got there was told last week when General Dwight Eisenhower officially commended the U.S. Navy's Captain Jerauld Wright for his part in the affair. On the night of Nov. 6 a British submarine edged through the mine fields into an unnamed French harbor. In charge of the expedition was Captain Wright. Less than a thousand yards from French warships, the sub surfaced at an already designated rendezvous. Sure enough, along came a rowboat containing three men and General Giraud, violently bobbing up & down in a heavy sea. As the elderly general tried to step out, he slipped and fell into the sea. One of the sub's crew caught him by the coat collar, hauled him aboard and away went the submarine, Africa-bound. The submarine was the same one which had landed Lieut. General Mark Clark in Algiers for the U.S. general's now famous pre-invasion parley. On that occasion General Clark also fell out of a rowboat. He lost his pants and $18,000 in gold.

In the columns of Trade-A-Plane Service, flyers' want-ad paper, appeared a plane-for-sale notice: "Stinson 10A Voyager 1941 . . . 290 hours . . . Price $3,000 cash. Communicate with . . . attorney for Maj. Gen. George S. Patton Jr., now spending the winter on the African Riviera."

"Ghost" was the new nickname for Ensign Marshall Field IV, son of the publisher: he was back on active duty, aboard a carrier in the South Pacific, after a sea-air battle in which he was blown out of his battle station by a bomb, wounded by shrapnel in the back, one arm and leg, knocked unconscious. He came to and resumed fighting, then was hit in the back of the head by a bullet which went through his helmet.

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