PEOPLE Politicos

Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia of New York, who eats assistants alive, was still looking for an executive secretary nearly three weeks after his last resigned. Though the job pays $10,000 a year, nobody had applied.

William Christian Bullitt, elegant ex-Ambassador to France, now candidate for mayor of Philadelphia, got into trouble with the city's tax receiver about the city's tax on wages. The dapper diplomat was charged with not filing his returns for 1940, '41 and '42 until last mont, when he reported his three years' wages as 33,535.14 and paid a tax of $108.94. The tax man had wanted to hear more about the ambassadorial expenses for which Bullitt had claimed deductions, but had been reminded that all the embassy records were destroyed when the Germans entered Paris. In a suit filed against Bullitt, the tax man still insisted that he wanted to hear more.

Henry Agard Wallace and Frank Knox ran into each other at the Naval Air Station outside Chicago, gave a demonstration of friendliness that made the traditional greeting of amicable Frenchmen look like a snub.

Warriors

Lieut. General Mark Clark's pants--the ones he lost in the water on his melodramatic sneak-trip to North Africa (TIME, Nov. 23, 1942)--are going to the Smithsonian Institution. The General's wife, who will present them, reported in Pittsburgh that they had been rescued from an African beach and ultimately returned to the General, who discovered they had shrunk and sent them home.

Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten's right hand was doing well enough after an operation to relieve a muscular contraction--a hangover from an old polo injury.

Major General Claire Chennault was hung with the D.F.C. in his parlor in Chungking. Ceremonial participants: four generals, two Chinese houseboys, and Chennault's dachshund, Joe.

Colonel Elliott Roosevelt was back in London on a secret mission the week after the announcement of his arrival in Washington.

Second Lieut. John G. Winant Jr., the Ambassador's son, who after a raid on Germany flew a Fortress with 75 flak holes safely to Africa, won a promotion to first lieutenant.

ATS Subaltern Mary Churchill dropped in at Washington's "Back the Attack" show, peeked over the edge of a cutout display, momentarily turned into a 2 1/2-dimensional WAC.

Eve Curie, newly arrived in London from the U.S., got down to work as a new private in the Corps Volontaires Franc,aises--the WAC of Free France.

Men of Substance

Christopher Smith Reynolds, ten-year-old posthumous son of the late, mysteriously shot Tobacco Heir Zachary Smith Reynolds (Camels) and Torchsinger Libby Holman Reynolds Holmes (Moanin' Low), cost his mother 42-c- more a month for "support, education and recreation" this year than he did last. This year's monthly outlay, according to a report filed in Baltimore's Orphans' Court: $6,944.86. The expense money comes from the boy's estate, originally some $7,000,000.

Marshall Field III, publisher of Chicago's Sun and of New York's PM, neared his 50th birthday and the last installment of his inheritance from his storekeeping millionaire grandfather. Five installments (at 25, 30, 35, 40, 45) have brought him $93 million. The astral fourth will be nearly $75 million.

Litterateurs

Romain Rolland, 77-year-old Nobel Prizewinning novelist (Jean-Christophe)* long unheard from, was reported in a German concentration camp. A longtime pacifist, he had returned to France and supported the war after nearly 25 above-the-battle years in Switzerland.

Drew Pearson, Washington Merry-Go-Rounder whose charges that the State Department is anti-Russian led the President to call him a "chronic liar," said that an Administration "Gestapo" had been tapping his wires. Government officials who had telephoned him, he declared, had since been confronted by their superiors with transcriptions of the conversations. The New York tabloid PM reported that Pearson's syndicator, United Features, had refused to allow him to reply to the President. PM published what it reported was a banned column, in which Pearson elaborated on the statements that had provoked the Presidential wrath.

Gypsy Rose Lee's new play, The Naked Genius, got a Hollywood offer of some $350,000 before its Boston opening this week.

John P. Marquand, Pulitzer Prizewinner, got about one-third that amount for the movie rights to his best-selling So Little Time.

* Vichy banned it in February 1941, 29 years after it was published.

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