Society

Mme. Paul Dubonnet, wife of the aperitif tycoon, once noted as "the best-dressed woman in Europe," renewed her pistol permit in Manhattan. She has been packing a rod ever since gunmen tried to rob her in a cab four years ago.

Daphne Hellman, blonde, curvilinear socialite harpist, lost a New York Court of Appeals decision in her fight for custody of her three-year-old son. Winner: the husband she divorced in 1941, Henry Adsit Bull Jr., Town & Country's playful editor.*

Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, wife of Pennsylvania's ex-governor, took a nephew and 13-year-old Presidential Grandson Curtis ("Buzzie") Dall to a ship launching in Baltimore. None of them had ever seen one before, she explained.

Nancy Oakes de Marigny, high-styled young daughter of the mysteriously slain Sir Harry Oakes, popped up in Miami and did some explaining: 1) she needs an operation on her mouth, is going back to Nassau to sell her furniture because the Bahamas forbid her to take her inheritance out of the country; 2) playful Husband "Freddie," deported to Havana after the Oakes trial, is not working because Cuba's labor laws governing aliens forbid him to; 3) Freddie "is restless with nothing to do."

Ann Farley, daughter of Jim, made a white-tulle-and-camellia debut at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria. In the receiving line, she accompanied herself by humming They're Either Too Young Or Too Old, did much of her handshaking with such oldsters as Morton Downey, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Westbrook Pegler, Elsa Maxwell, William Bullitt.

Actors

Army Air Forces Captain Clark Gable, safe & sound on the ground, stopped his car at a Hollywood intersection, stopped another car when it smashed into his. Result: bruises, a high-voltage joltage.

Lieut, (j.g.) Robert Taylor won his wings, a flight instructor's certificate, a pat from his commanding officer (". . . one of the best records . . .") at New Orleans' Naval Air Station.

Musicians

Albert Spalding was busy canceling concerts so that he could introduce some doubtful notes into Fortress Europe. The Europe-wise violinist's "special" services (nonmusical) had been earmarked for spring use abroad by the Allied Forces' Psychological Warfare Branch.

Arturo Toscanini did, from hate of Mussolini, what Hollywood could not persuade him to do for love or money. He made his first movie. In a short for foreign distribution he belabored old enemies with the words he wrote last year for Verdi's Hymn of the Nations ("Italy betrayed").

Statesmen

Henry Agard Wallace, often laid out for his oratorical generosities, lay down on a Red Cross cot in Washington, gave his corpuscular pint to the blood bank.

Senator Carter Glass, reigning eagle of the capital's elder statesmen, last-ditch foe of funny finance, good friend of Franklin Roosevelt, passed his 86th birthday in his Washington apartment receiving friends, letters, cakes, and an autographed photograph of the President.

Lookers

Joan Blondell, bouncy cinemarmful whose eight-year-old marriage to Crooner Dick Powell (her second) has been one of Hollywood's most sunnily publicized unions, announced that she would sue for divorce, reissued the dated doggerel she had indited after her first divorce:

Life is phony with baloney,

From the start until it's done;

Gold or tatters, neither matters,

For the strife of life is fun!

Danielle Darrieux, childish heart-tugger of Mayerling, has been marked for death by the French underground, according to the journalistic undergroundling Bir Hacheim. The complaint: she has been a Nazi collaborationist. Dewily sexy Danielle returned to France for a short stay seven years ago, never came back to the U.S., was last in the news in '42, when she married the Dominican charge d'affaires in Vichy.

Greta Garbo, still in Manhattan, continued to fascinate the columnists: Elsa Maxwell reported that she calls Noel Coward "William," and he calls her "Harriet."

Beards

George Bernard Shaw, asked his views on a postwar plan for the permanent disablement of Germany, came back hot & heavy: ". . .cowardly rubbish, impudent and pretentious and so deliberately wicked that if it were not fortunately quite impossible to put it into practice it would justify a holy alliance against any power giving the slightest countenance to it."

Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, BBC's well-aired Philosopher with a capital P. declared that suicide is the privilege of a man who finds life unendurable. Promptly a defeated citizen of Belfast turned on the gas. Defeated again, he was haled before a magistrate. Tutted the jurist: "Surely there is no sense in paying heed to Joad."

*Mr. Bull claims that he once bested the Duke of Windsor in a pillow fight.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.