Grand Tourists

The Duke of Windsor made his ninth trip to the U.S. since he became Governor of the Bahamas in 1940. With him, making her seventh, was his Duchess. They planned to spend a month in Manhattan, perhaps visit his Canadian ranch (see CANADA AT WAR).

Madame Chiang Kaishek, who spent three months in a U.S. hospital on her last visit (1942-43) to the Western Hemisphere, arrived by plane in Brazil. She was suffering from nervous exhaustion and insomnia, planned a three-month rest cure. In China, she had been under the care of U.S. Assistant Naval Attache Commander Frank Harrington, said he had warned her that "I'd never be cured if I stayed in Chungking."

Charles Augustus Lindbergh, United Aircraft Corp.'s lanky, balding research engineer, now demonstrating high-altitude flight methods to U.S. airmen in the Pacific, got down from his plane and hobnobbed with Lieut. General George Churchill Kenney, commander of the Far Eastern Air Forces (see cut).

Second Thoughts

Benito Mussolini, according to a report from the New York Times' crack Rome Correspondent Herbert L. Matthews, lost 50 pounds in the last nerve-racking month of his dictatorship. Source for the story was an Italian army doctor who treated Mussolini's ulcers, heard him complain: "The Italian people is a superficial people in every way, even in religion. They believe in a saint only when, and to the extent that he answers their prayers. . . . They cover themselves with a varnish that has no depth and leaves no trace."

Mae West opened her new show, Catherine Was Great, in Philadelphia. Her first legitimate playwriting effort since The Constant Sinner in 1931, it was saluted as "dull" and "soggy" by critics. But Philadelphians kept packing in to hear Mae's latest line: "I've had a very busy day. Now I feel like seeing the man who's never seen a woman in his life."

Beatrice Lillie, Britain's brittle, brilliant No. 1 musicomedienne, working harder than ever at entertaining soldiers since the 1942 death in Far East action of her 20-year-old son, Sir Robert Peel, was signed by Broadway's Billy Rose to make her first U.S. appearance in five years. She will star with Comedian Bert Lahr in Rose's Seven Lively Arts, to open in December.

Basil O'Connor, solid, slick-haired onetime law partner of President Roosevelt, head of his pet philanthropy, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, was appointed by the President to a new $12,000-a-year post: Chairman of the American Red Cross, succeeding the late Norman Hezekiah Davis.

William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson, Chicago's late three-time showman-mayor, who cached some $1,500,000 in safe-deposit boxes which were undiscovered until his death (TIME, March 27), was claimed as a relative by scores of Thompsons. One Wisconsin claimant asked for $20,000 because Big Bill had promised to remember him for once saving his life by pressing a dime under Big Bill's nose to stop its bleeding.

John P. Marquand, best-selling satirist whose last novel So Little Time took sundry pokes at the Book-of-the-Month Club (one poke: "She did not want to have books picked out for her beforehand by ... the Book-of-the-Month Club."), and was the most popular Book-of-the-Month for 1943, joined the Club's editorial board.* This made his future books ineligible for selection, but Marquand declared he was glad "to be in a position to exploit American writers," and forgot about his past poking: "Don't blame me for what my characters say. ... I can't remember."

Knighthood's Flower

Margherita Clement, comely, 22-year-old Philadelphia socialite, ex-Powers model, smacked a damage suit on the man who last year stabbed her with a paring knife and hit her over the head with a whiskey bottle in the powder room of Philadelphia's Hotel Barclay. (Her attacker, onetime Soldier Socialite Sidney B. Dunn Jr., who gave as his reason, "She won't marry me and I'll fix her or kill her so she won't marry anybody else," is now serving a three-to-seven-year prison term.) Miss Clement asked $25,000 damages on the grounds that Dunn's treatment had caused "unpleasant publicity" and affected her "eligibility as a marriageable young lady in her social class."

Jeannette MacDonald, redhaired Hollywoodienne, jumped out of bed in a Santa Barbara hotel cottage when she heard a door slam, got a black eye and face cuts struggling with a 14-year-old bellboy who said he was looking for souvenirs.

* He joined Novelists Dorothy Canfield and Christopher Morley, Litterateur Henry Seidel Canby, Informer Clifton Fadiman, as a life replace ment for the late Editor William Allen White.

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