Warriors

Lieut. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., aboard the destroyer Mayrant at a North African port, was decorated with the Silver Star (for gallantry) and the Purple Heart (for wounds). In a heavy enemy air attack on Palermo last August, he had given first aid to two wounded men on the Mayrant's bridge, carried one of them down to a dressing station "with disregard for his own safety" (TIME, Nov. 1). He was wounded in the hand.

Sergeant Peter Brook Saltonstall, somewhere in the South Pacific, gave his old man a break. He had been sending him $25 a month from his Marine pay, but the Governor of Massachusetts will henceforth get $50.

Disputants

Rita Hay worth Welles did her best to buy her privacy back from 47-year-old Edward Charles Judson after she sued him for divorce, but last week she had less of it than ever. Freshly settled was ex-Husband Judson's suit charging that she had not paid all the $12,000 she had promised him. When the papers in the case were unsealed, the details of the original divorce settlement were exposed to the public view. Ex-Husband Judson was to get, besides the $12,000, all the actress' community property except her household furnishings and one of two automobiles. In return Judson promised not to "sell, give away, circulate, or dispose of any matter arising out of their marital relationship"; and not to "imply . . . that she has committed an offense involving moral turpitude . . . or . . . conducted herself in any manner which would cause her to be held in scorn, or which would damage her career."

Constance Bennett, wide-eyed prom queen of the jazz age, gold-plated honey of the cinema since 1924's Cytherea, scored heavily in her role as a mother. Now 38, she won for her 14-year-old son, Peter Bennett Plant, a $150,000 cut of the estate left by the second of her four husbands. At present the wife of ex-Cinemactor Gilbert Roland, she first married a University of Virginia boy, had the marriage annulled; next married Manhattan playboy Philip Morgan Plant, got a divorce and a $1 million settlement; next married and divorced the high-styled Marquis Henri de la Falaise de la Coudraye.

For more than a decade after she divorced Plant, she claimed she had adopted the baby boy she brought back from abroad. Plant died in 1941; a trust fund of more than a half million dollars was to go to his offspring, if he had any. Recently Constance Bennett declared that her adopted son was really hers and Plant's, born after their divorce, that she had adopted the boy to keep his father from getting custody of him. Last week, when Plant's mother and his show-girl widow were fighting a court battle with Miss Bennett over the trust fund, she promised that if she got to the witness stand she would give a complete account of her life with Plant. The matter was settled out of court. Miss Bennett picked up her baggage and doll and returned to her theatrical mutton.

Litterateurs

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, rarely heard from in the past two years, proved to have been writing her first novel. It concerns a young couple in a plane.

Salvador Dali (Secret Life of Salvador Dali) had also finished his first novel. Characteristically, he said he had again chosen Dial for his publishers, because the name is an anagram of his.

George Bernard Shaw gave an old-fashioned Shavian interview to a London reporter who asked him, among other things: 1) How can women rid themselves of their many current handicaps? 2) What is the cause of the Briton's patronizing attitude toward women? 3) Should the housewife have an economic status? Shaw's answers: 1) "They are not handicapped. . . . It is men who are handicapped now." 2) "It doesn't exist. Men are abjectly afraid of women, not without reason." 3) "She has it. The country is run by women."

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