Casualties
Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, handsome, debonair Allied chief for Southeast Asia, slapped in the left eye by a stalk of bamboo while on a jeep tour of the Burma front, was treated for a minor face cut.
Herbert Lehman, Director of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation, was briefly hospitalized in Algiers after fracturing his kneecap in a fall.
Martha Stevenson Kemp Mature, blond ex-wife of Swingster Hal Kemp and Victor ("Beautiful Hunk") Mature, arrived in Manhattan from Palm Beach with a bump on her head. According to the New York Journal-American's society page, she had been jarred awake in her sleeping car, sat upright, "rapped her lovely sconce" on the upper berth.
Presly S. Anheuser, 32-year-old beer scion, father of two, was indicted for camouflaging himself against the draft in farmer's overalls. Owner of a 520-acre farm in Hawk Point, Mo. he was charged by a federal grand jury with obtaining a 3C classification (agricultural deferment) by filing a false report on the number of his livestock.*
King Vittorlo Emanuele of Italy, according to the weekly Italia Libera, was asked what pained him most when he had to leave Rome. Mourned he: "Having to leave my collection of coins."
Beneficiaries
Olivia de Havilland, Tokyo-born brunette (see cut), was rescued from potential "life service" to Warner Bros. by a Superior Court in Los Angeles. In a ruling which the Motion Picture Daily called "precedent-establishing," the judge declared that to add the accumulated lost time of her seven suspensions to the seven calendar years of her contract "would amount to virtual peonage." Warner Bros. declared that it had just begun to fight.
William Allen White left his half interest in the Emporia Gazette to his wife. Three quarters of the shares are now hers, the rest belong to their son William Lindsay (They Were Expendable) White. To his wife the late editor also left an unappraised estate--listed in probate court at a value of $68,500--and $65,000 in insurance. For each of 14 employes whose Gazette service amounted to 20 years or more he specified a gift of $1,000. At week's end the Gazette's masthead was revised to read: "W. A. White, Editor, 1895-1944; Mrs. W. A. White and W. L. White, Editors and Owners."
Eric Coates, British composer, whose lilting "Knightsbridge" episode in the London Suite is a great English favorite, surprised an unnamed Bishop who was whistling it in a tube station by introducing himself and correcting the Bishop's melody, was surprised himself when the Bishop bolted.
Floridians
Mr. & Mrs. Joseph E. (Mission to Moscow) Davies, of Roslyn, L.I., Washington, Upper St. Regis Lake, N.Y., and Palm Beach's "Mar-a-Lago" formed a jaunty twosome (see cut, p. 43) at Palm Beach.
Henry Ford bent over the world's palm, foretold (for the Atlanta Constitution) that the war would be over in two months. "I can't tell my reasons. I have them, of course. That's all I care to say on the subject." The World War I Peace-Shipper continued: "My message to young people, those in uniform and those out of uniform, is simply this: find out the cause of war. That will stop wars quicker than anything I know. I could tell them, but it doesn't seem to work that way, somehow. They must find out for themselves." Asked what he considered the greatest single postwar problem, he replied: "Go to work. That's the answer to everything--. . . greeds, creeds, and boundary lines must go."
General Douglas MacArthur, before a banquet in his honor in Canberra, received the Knight's Cross of the Order of the Bath, Military Division, First Class--to which King George elevated him in 1943.* From Prime Minister John Curtin (soon to visit the U.S.) he got good wishes: "I trust that [General MacArthur] will live for many years to look back on the day he first arrived in this country for which he has done so much." Responded the soldier: "Two years ago when I landed on your soil I said to the people of the Philippines, whence I came: 'I shall return.' Tonight I repeat those words: 'I shall return.'. . . My thoughts go back to those men who went on their last crusade in the jungle thicknesses to the north where they made the fight that saved this continent. . . ."
Sexologists
Katherine Hepburn, long nettled by Hollywood's unimpassioned response to her idea of filming Eugene O'Neill's lengthy, incestuous Mourning Becomes Electra, lamented the fact of movie censorship. Los Angeles Times Drama Editor Edwin Schallert reported that "substantially this is what [she] told me": "Really deep consideration of the issue of sex . . . has no chance to be translated onto the screen under the present system of censorship. Yet at the same time, in musicals and other lighter entertainment, you find sex exploited in an intriguing, inveigling, 'peeking' sort of way that is much more meretriciously alluring than honest dramatic studies and impressions."
Harold L. Ickes recalled for New York Sunday Times Magazine readers a widening of the horizon which he experienced at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893: "The strange and even erotic goings-on that had been brought to . . . the Fair, gave me exciting moments of a new sort. I realized the importance of the Fair, and the opportunity it gave for a wide and diversified education. . . ."
* Recalling an ancient bit of free-lunchers' free verse:
A boy fell off Anheuser-Busch
And tore his pants to Schlitz.
He rose a sad Budweiser boy,
Pabst yes, Pabst no.
* Some other U.S. generals honored for their services in World War II: Dwight Eisenhower (also a K.C.B.), Ira Eaker (Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire), Mark Clark (Knight of the Order of the British Empire).
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