Winners . . .

Captain Jonathan M. Wainwright 5th, seagoing son of the lieutenant general captured on Corregidor by the Japs, was awarded the D.S.M. of the Merchant Marine in Manhattan. Master of a ship bombed at Salerno, he had first abandoned her with the crew after a fire in a hold full of high octane gasoline had risen mast-high. Then he returned with one man and took off wounded. The ship later exploded.

Betty Grable was the year's biggest box-office draw, exhibitors reported to Motion Picture Herald. She was the first female winner since Shirley Temple (1935-38). Second biggest: Bob Hope. Still among the top ten: Captain Clark Gable.

Paul Lukas and Greet Garson, according to U.S. critics polled by Film Daily, did the best cinemacting of the year, he in Watch on the Rhine, she in Random Harvest. She got the same honor (plus an Oscar) last year for Mrs. Miniver.

Viscountess Astor accepted a challenge at a U.S. Army camp in Britain, told a bunch of dialect stories to the troops, presently struggled away with a prize: a 40-lb. pig.

Bluebeard

Charles Chaplin had another protegee. Dark, blue-eyed Alice Ealand, ex-model, said he had offered to star her in his next picture. Six months after his marriage to 18-year-old Oona O'Neill (his fourth), six weeks before the blood test which can clear him of ex-Protegee Joan Barry's paternity charge, Chaplin announced his next picture's subject. He will do the story of Bluebeard, with an "amusing angle." Miss Ealand, newcomer to Hollywood, said she would appear as the wife whom Bluebeard-Chaplin does not do away with.

Losers

Walter Hampden stopped the show at a Manhattan revival of The Patriots--in order to resist an invasion of paper planes from the moppetous matinee audience. The lean-faced romantic actor, a grandfather, managed ultimately to finish the performance by threatening not to. "After all," he observed, "The Patriots is an adult play. . . ."

Robert Elliott Burns (I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang) lost a plea for a Georgia pardon. Now a Newark, N.J. tax consultant, U.S. Fugitive No. 1 had the backing of Georgia's Governor Ellis G. Arnall, but the best the pardon board would offer was: "If and when the escapee surrenders . . . the board . . . will be happy to investigate. . . ."

The late John Barrymore's pet dachshund, Gus, ran in front of a car in Hollywood and was killed. Explained the late Great Profile's friend, Painter John Decker, the dachshund's stepmaster: for the first time in years a certain part in an operatic revival had gone to another dog, and Gus, a born ham, had taken the only alternative.

Persons of Property

John Galsworthy, oaken novelist, left an appropriate mansion in London when he died in 1933. Its furnishings have just been sold. The Nobel Prizewinner's favorite armchair brought only -L-21; his desk, -L-9.

Jean Barrel, 1943's Miss America, got home from a bond-selling tour. She reported in Los Angeles that she had sold $2,500,000 worth with her clothes on, was now convinced that the "bubble bath and cheesecake" era was over with.

Richard Allen Knight, disbarred Manhattan lawyer who once stood on his head in front of the Metropolitan Opera House, had at some of his former cronies in another of his privately famed, privately printed brochures--this one as a Christmas throwaway. Title of this year's effort: Our Friends and Relatives All Stink, or Just Awearyin' for You. He reported happily that he had induced his ex-wife (Dorothy, daughter of the late Lewis Cass Ledyard Jr.) "to spend $2 on me for every $1 she spends on herself. . . . I am just not happy unless I have lots and lots of money to spend. I mean I have to have it. It is my nature. I am like that."

Drummer

Gene Krupa got the greatest ovation in the history of Broadway's Paramount Theater -- on his first theater date since he was paroled from San Quentin last summer on a narcotics charge. He was sitting at the drums with Tommy Dorsey's band when it rose in the dark out of the pit. There had been no announcement that he was back. Hepcats in the audience saw him before the lights went up. They started murmuring. The opening number was Gettin' Sentimental Over You. Four thousand enthusiasts shouted and beat their hands off. Drummer Krupa wept on his drums.

Seeress

Fannie Hurst, literary heart-throbber, foresaw even further emancipation for women after the war but confessed: "I am beginning to doubt whethr we want it." She added: "Home fires are going to roar."

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