Stars with Garters

Charles Chaplin was indicted by a federal grand jury for two violations of the Mann Act. The comedian, who married 18-year-old Oona O'Neill last June, was charged with "causing to be transported Joan Berry ... by railway . . . with the intent and purpose of having the said woman engage in illicit sex relations . . . [Indictment 1] from Los Angeles to New York" and [Indictment 2] in the other direction. Joan claims that he fathered her four-month-old daughter Carol Ann. The grand jury also accused Chaplin of conspiring with others to influence Beverly Hills Judge Charles Griffin to railroad Joan out of town, to influence her to plead guilty under a vagrancy charge of which she was innocent, to deprive her of her Constitutional rights.* If guilty on all counts, 54-year-old Chaplin could be fined $26,000, spend 23 years in federal prison. But to deport British Subject Chaplin from the U.S., two proved offenses against the Mann Act would be enough.

Michele Morgan, saffron-haired Hollywood import from France, told a Manhattan reporter that Hollywood's wolves "should be beaten to death." She pushed the point that they were a talebearing species. "Some poor little girl comes to Hollywood. She's lonely. . . . The wolves call and call. . . . You have lunch . . . they'll seem so nice, courteous, and very correct. . . . Six months later the girl is supposed to be . . . the most horrible person in Hollywood. . . . They have an ego that has been frustrated."

Idols

Francis Xavier Bushman, 60-year-old matinee idol, got his first good film part in 15 years--playing Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch in the forthcoming Wilson. Bushman was a feverish Romeo in Hollywood's first Shakespeare (1916), a furious Messala in Ben Hur (1923), claims to have made and spent $6,000,000.

Irene Bordoni, super-Frenchy musicomedy veteran (Hitchy Koo, Little Miss Bluebeard, Naughty Cinderella), was the new chanteuse of Manhattan's La Vie Parisienne nightclub. The fiftyish, Corsica-born brunette sang favorites new & old (old favorites: If You Could Care for Me, Let's Do It, Do it Again), described her hairdo as the American Push--"Poosh all my hair on a other side."

Gloria Vanderbilt di Cicco, often good for a column but never before a columnist, wrote a page of chatter for the New York Journal-American's syndicated magazine Home. Sample: the day after he first met his wife (Actress Carol Marcus), William Saroyan wrote her a poem called Snow. It began: "You are out of the snow of the past--the most beautiful thing in all the snow--the most delicate--the most alone."

Fritz Kreisler signed his first radio contract--with an NBC summer musical program. The violinist had two good reasons for changing his antiradio mind: 1) wartime travel restrictions, 2) pleas from his fans.

Personal Effects

Mary Todd Lincoln's hitherto unpublished answer to Queen Victoria, in response to the Queen's letter on Lincoln's assassination, was released in facsimile by Manhattan's Rosenbach Co. Wrote Prince Consort Albert's widow of less than three years: ". . . No one can appreciate better than I can, who am myself utterly brokenhearted by the loss of my own beloved husband . . . what your sufferings must be. . . ." Replied Mrs. Lincoln: "... Accept, Madam, the assurance of my heartfelt thanks. . . ."

James John ("Jimmy") Walker's famed reception boat of the '20s, the Macom, was sold by New York City for $3,150 to the Battery Sightseeing Boat Co., will be used on Manhattan sightseeing trips. Receptionist Grover Aloysius Whalen, new chairman of Mayor LaGuardia's Committee for a World Fashion Center, said he had not the "slightest idea" how many trips he had taken on the Macom with such personages as Richard Evelyn Byrd, James Ramsay MacDonald, Queen Marie of Rumania, Pierre Laval. The boat will be renamed James J. Walker, after the current Impartial Chairman of New York's garment industry.

Philosopher

Edward B. Marks, spry, 78-year-old Tin Pan Alley song publisher, celebrated his 50th anniversary in the Alley by pounding out some of his famed publications. They include: Mother Was A Lady, School Days, Paper Doll, A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight. Declared Mr. Marks: "I wouldn't live my life over for all the money in the Fourth War Loan."

*Others variously charged in the indictments were: Beverly Hills Police Judge Charles Griffin, Police Captain W. W. White, Policeman Claude Marple, Police Matron Jessie Billie Reno and Chaplin chums Thomas Wells Durant and Robert Arden.

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