Hosts

Herbert Clark Hoover, fishing tripper, and the Duke of Windsor, his luncheon host in the Duke's Bahaman bailiwick, forthrightly, erectly double-breasted the news camera (see cut).

Noel Coward, on a morale-building tour of South Africa, nettled Afrikaner Nationalist Politico Paul Sauer by his imperial arrival in Cape Town. Egg-bald Sauer took the teakwood floor of the House of Assembly to fume: "The Governor of our sister state [Southern Rhodesia's Sir Evelyn Baring] traveled in a small coupe compartment but the crooner (a crooner is someone who sings as if something were wrong with his throat) came in a special coach. Have we lost our balance to such an extent that we make heroes of film actors and music-hall luminaries at the state expense?" Twitted a Cape Towner: "Please, Mr. Sauer, don't be beastly to Mr. Coward." Twitted Coward, observing that in his wartime travels he had been rumored to be both an admiral incognito and a secret agent : "Fortunately for my self-respect, nobody's ever called me a politician."

Paulette Goddard, newly arrived in Free China, was won in a drawing of straws by U.S. Army Fourteenth Air Forces Lieuts. Duane C. McDonald and Francis M. Stefanak. They turned down bids as high as $100 for their privilege of flying her on visits to servicemen at Chinese bases.

Sailors & Soldiers

Navy Lieut. Alfred GwynneVanderbilt, 31-year-old turfman turned South Pacific PT-boat skipper, was photographed with his 29-year-old brother George (also a lieutenant) at an advanced base in New Guinea (see cut). Apparently greasemonkeys to a considerable chunk of naval equipment, the descendants of the fabulous, family-founding skipper of the Staten Island ferry betrayed their rank only by their officer-like mustaches.

Joseph Wright Alsop Jr., kin to both the Roosevelts, crack peacetime Washington correspondent (with Robert Kintner), was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Army Air Forces, appointed aide to Major General Claire L. Chennault. Since 1941 Alsop had successively: 1) been in the Naval Reserve; 2) resigned from it; 3) been captured as a State Department man by the Japanese; 4) been repatriated; 5) worked with Chennault as a Lend-Lease man.

Dwight David Eisenhower, quoted by Universal Press Service Correspondent Effie Alley, wrote to an old friend who writes to him from Kansas about her visits to his 82-year-old mother in Abilene: ". . . Next time you call on my Mother, tell her I am well and miss her all the time. I only wish that planes flew fast enough that I could spend one day with her and be back here the following day for work. I would go A.W.O.L. that long!"

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Persia's handsome, 24-year-old Shah (his Queen is the beauteous Egyptian Princess Fawzia, sister of Egypt's King Farouk) was presented with a jeep by Major General Donald Hilary Connolly, U.S. Commander in the Persian Gulf area.

Jesse Stuart, Kentucky's hillbilly poet-novelist (Taps for Private Tussie), father of one, passed his pre-induction physical examination.

Alan Ladd, the cinema's percussion-captious tough guy, discharged by the Army as too brittle last fall, was called for a retake, rumored fit to be retaken.

Richard ("Red") Skelton, comedian classified 1-A after his wife divorced him last month, was also acceptable.

Philip Van Doren Stern, Manhattan publisher, was noted by The Saturday Review of Literature's Columnist Bennett Cerf for his quick response to a suggestion that Armed Services Editions (of which he is an editor) print The Ten Commandments. Mulled Stern, who once worked for best-selling literary treasurers Simon & Schuster: "How about using only five of them and calling it A Treasury of the World's Best Commandments?"

Athletes

Johnny Weissmuller, continuing his one-man, one-lifetime, evolutionary ascent from the cinema's ape-man to man (TIME, March 6). gave up his crowning Tarzan glory (see cut).

Betty Hutton, loose-jointed, incendiary blonde (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek), was told that she had cracked three ribs after being tossed by a team of acrobats during the filming of Incendiary Blonde.

Dr. George Morris Dorrance, Philadelphia's soup-rich (Campbell) facial surgeon, was saved from drowning in a high surf at Palm Beach's Bath & Tennis Club by munitions-rich Lammot du Pont and two naval officers.

Wonderland Week

Jennifer Jones (24-year-old, Tulsa-born Mrs. Phylis Isley Walker) was canonized by the cinema for her first starring performance--as the sainted peasant girl in The Song of Bernadette. As she took her Oscar from last year's winner, Greer Garson, the brown-haired, brown-eyed one-time Western player bit her lip, smiled and said: "I am thrilled and I am grateful." For his anti-Nazi stand in Watch on the Rhine, grave-toned Paul Lukas led the men. Other statuettes: 1) best film of 1943, Casablanca; 2) best director, Casablanca's Michael Curtiz; 3) best supporting actor, Charles Coburn in The More the Merrier; 4) best supporting actress, Greek-born Katina Paxinou--for her fire-&-ice Pilar in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Salvador Dali, super-successful surrealist, explained--in glossy Town & Country --how he did it: ''I am quite probably the artist who works the hardest." Dali said he wrote his "long and boring" forthcoming novel in four New Hampshire months of '"fourteen implacable hours" of work a day. His heroine, Solange de Cleda, is a symbol of what he calls Cledalism--"pleasure and pain sublime in an all-transcending identification with the object."

Dorothy Lamour received a letter from a Czechoslovakian soldier stationed in Great Britain: "I love you very much. I dream about you every night. Please send me a carton of American cigarets."

(Ole) Olson & (Chic) Johnson, hellza-poppers, told United Press Hollywood correspondent Frederick Othman that their monkey-wrench minds were already at work on the sets of their new snow: Jerks Berserk. Some of their newest secret weapons: eight seats in the third row which drop customers into the cellar, hot-water drinking fountains, dachshunds coached to steal the shoes of foot-easing women.

Loretta Young, gazelle-eyed, 31-year-old cinemactress, vacationing at Palm Springs, confided to the press that she expected her first in the fall. Ex-wife of Cinemactor Grant Withers, wife of Lieut. Colonel Thomas Lewis, peacetime radio advertising man, she has an adopted daughter Judy, 8.

Bob Hope got Variety's "special citation" ("for his unceasing efforts to bring a plasma of laughs to the men in uniform"), a cold, a slight ear infection, a week's delay in his cross-country tour of service camps.

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