The Literary Life

Gypsy Rose Lee (The G-String Murders) bought for $250 a vast, secondhand bed. It will help equip her new 30-room town house in Manhattan. In the White House it was occupied by President Benjamin Harrison.

Elsa Maxwell (The Life of Barbara Button) announced in her syndicated column that to Columnist Dorothy Thompson, soon to be married, she had given a wedding present of a pair of blankets.

Elina Sjostedt Tyszecka Cain, second wife of 50-year-old James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice), told a Los Angeles divorce judge that the side-mouth novelist once took her by the arm and threw her "clear across the room. "Writers are funny people," mused Mrs. Cain. She won her divorce.

Memory Book

Clara Bow, the cinema's "It" girl of the late '20s, was recovering from a nervous breakdown on the California ranch where she lives with her husband Rex Bell.

Ann Pennington, dimple-kneed darling of the late Ziegfeld Follies, was back on Broadway in hoopskirts for this week's revival of The Student Prince.

Shadow & Substance

"I was in seventh heaven. I went every night to his house. Then he dropped me." With the Errol Flynn case scarcely disposed of, a pretty red-haired Hollywood drama student named Joan Berry was speaking of apple-cheeked little Charles Spencer Chaplin. The mother of pregnant Miss Berry filed a paternity suit against the 54-year-old comedian, asked $10,000 for prenatal care, $5,000 court costs, $2,500 a month for the support of the child. Pending a court hearing, Chaplin declared: "I am not responsible for Miss Berry's condition." He charged incidentally that she had demanded $150,000 from him. Miss Berry was the umpteenth* Chaplin protegee. For her he bought Paul Vincent Carroll's religious drama Shadow & Substance, but the picture was never produced. Last January, Beverly Hills police arrested Miss Berry on a charge of annoying Chaplin; she was given a 90-day jail sentence (suspended) and then ordered out of town. Last month she was picked up again near the Chaplin mansion, charged with vagrancy and given a 30-day sentence. Last fortnight she lunched with Chaplin. Last week she said she had slipped into his house and heard him talking fondly to another protegee. "It all sounded so corny," she reported.

After the Balls

Because there have been "no debuts or social functions to speak of" for a year now, plump, persimmonish, seventyish Juliana Cutting retired last week as Manhattan's No. 1 social arranger and secretary. For nearly 20 years she has been ordering smilax, keeping the wrong people out of parties.

Born into a wealthy family (her grandfather was Banker Robert Livingston Cutting), she made her own debut in 1890 with the present Lady Ribblesdale (once Mrs. John Jacob Astor). When the family fortune fizzled, she taught ballroom dancing, then began to run other people's parties. Among her notable managements were the Joseph E. Davies-Marjorie Post Hutton wedding, a Long Island party for the Prince of Wales, the Ritz-Carlton reception for Queen Marie of Rumania (remembering the gate crashers, she later remarked that apparently "there was never in history a country which had quite so many warm friends in New York at that time as Rumania").

Famed as "Miss Cutting's List" was her blue book of data on some 2,000 youths she considered acceptable guests. She would personally have preferred a smaller list, abhorred the custom of inviting three young men for every girl, once blamed it for the rise in alcoholic consumption. She recommended "a boy and a half to a girl, if a dinner dance, and two to one if a supper dance."

Divorce & The Dempseys

Still playing the romantic lead in the season's hit divorce trial was slat-shaped Prizefight Manager Benny Woodall, no muscular match for his accuser but apparently a fearless man. Witnesses for Husband Jack Dempsey testified that they had rushed with him into a Los Angeles apartment ("Mr. Dempsey leaned against the door and it went down") and found red-headed wife Hannah in blue pajamas, Woodall in pajama trousers and undershirt. A detective testified that, when Mrs. Dempsey asked her husband what he was doing there, Mr. Dempsey's reply was: "I'm following you and that rat, and you're a no good rat yourself, running around with a rat like that, and me out trying to defend my country." Next on the stand, Mrs. Dempsey's side.

*Some others: Georgia Hale (The Gold Rush), Merna Kennedy (The Circus), Mildred Harris (whom he married), Lita Grey (ditto), Paulette Goddard (ditto).

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