Darlings

Tallulah Bankhead heard that among the 20-odd reporters gathered in honor of her role in Lifeboat (see p. 94) was a young woman from New York City's crusading newspaper PM, "My God, if I'd known," seethed Tallulah. "Of all the filthy, rotten, Communist rags . . . that is the most vicious ['clenched fists up to ear level,' dutifully noted the PM reporter], dangerous . . . hating paper . . . cruel . . . unfair ... I loathe it ... Darling, I hope I haven't hurt you." To PM's editor, a few days later, Tallulah wrote a note: ". . . Convey my thanks to the young lady ... for the accuracy and integrity of her reporting."

Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, mighty Chicago Anglophobe, described a honey of a plan he had helped work out to defend the U.S. from invasion by the British--after World War I. He told Cleveland's City Club about a scheme "to establish a line about 40 miles long across the isthmus between Lakes Huron and Erie which would protect Detroit" from a possible army "of 300,000 regulars [from] England" which would be "landed in Canada and marched against this country." The Colonel explained that he had worked out the plan with the American General Staff. Added he: "The idea [of the attack] appears fantastic!"

Challengers

Vivien Kellems, Westport, Conn, cable-grip manufacturer, in a speech to a Kansas City civic group, invited manufacturers to a "Westport tea party" -- to form postwar reserves for their industries by putting aside money from their Federal income taxes. "Put on your Indian paint and feathers and join me," cried the 48-year-old, youthful, minister's daughter. "I owe it to my country ... to help rectify this horrible mistake which will most certainly carry us right into the abyss of Communism." Cited as U.S. industry's leading lady (by the National Association of Manufacturers), one of the country's ten best-dressed women (by the Fashion Academy), 100 outstanding women (by Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt), Miss Kellems explained that she needs the Government's money to build her reserve because her own money is tied up in a reserve of materials. To Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, her stand "smack[ed] of disloyalty."

Katherine Dunham, Negro ballerina, drew attention to the fact that in her Tropical Revue she wears a pearl in her navel instead of a diamond--because Gypsy Rose Lee had copied the diamond.

William Thomas Cosgrave, wild-haired, mild-eyed little leader of Eire's muted opposition party (the Fine Gael), retired. Successively a bar-boy, Sinn Feiner (he was sentenced to death, later pardoned for his part in 1916's Easter Rebellion) and Eire President (1922-32), 63-year-old Cosgrave is reported to have been ailing for eight years.

Classics

Gypsy Rose Lee wrote to Walter Winchell from her Fort Bragg sickbed: "Everyone had flu but me. I gotta get lobar pneumonia, and me with no lobars. At least, not big lobars like other girls."

Mildred Riddle Douglas, 41, blonde wife of Supreme Court Justice William Orville Douglas, took over a Washington, D.C. junior high school Latin class (see cut). When the principal called Substitute Douglas, who last taught Latin almost 20 years ago, he did not know she was the Justice's wife. Said her judicious pupils: "She knows Latin good."

Artur Rodzinski, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, anathematized jazz. Said he: "With so many homes broken as a result of the family head serving in the armed forces, parental supervision is lacking, and this type of music leads to war degeneracy." For the rebuttal up rose Leopold Stokowski: "Some foreigners do not understand how rich the U.S. is in folk music. . . ." Said Frank Sinatra (whose worshipers had been labeled "pitiful cases" by Rodzinski): "Nuts! . . . After all, I grew up in a jazz craze, and I did all right."

Likenesses

George Bernard Shaw denied that famed British Cartoonist David Low's cartoons of G.B.S. were convincing. Said Shaw: "One day when I went into a friend's flat I saw a caricature of me that seemed to be good--cruel, of course, but still what a caricature should be. Then . .. I saw it was a mirror."

Alain Dorian, 29-year-old, polio-myelitic son of assassinated French Admiral Jean Franc,ois Darlan, chatted with Mary Pickford (chairman of the women's division of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis) at Georgia's Warm Springs Foundation Hospital. A onetime French naval officer, Alain looked remarkably like his seadog father--whose 1942 dash from France to Algiers (where his son was first stricken) resulted in his collaboration with U.S. forces. President Roosevelt reportedly provided Alain's plane trip from North Africa to the Warm Springs Foundation Hospital several months after his father's death.

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