Fun & Games

Henry L. Stimson, whose weekly press conferences are Washington's most austere since Herbert Hoover's, was greeted on his 77th birthday by a chorus of reporters singing a lusty "Happy birthday, dear Henry!" Responded the shy, dignified Secretary of War: "Ladies and gentlemen, I am very grateful. After that, everything seems drab." Asked to guess the date of V-day, he said: "Well, I hope I live long enough to see V-day. Further than that the prophet sayeth not."

Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands was admitted by King George VI into Britain's most ancient (founded in 1349), most exclusive (41 living members) Order of the Garter, thus became the first foreign Queen and the third living woman (only others are Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary) entitled to wear on her left arm the society's diamond-studded garter.

The Ago Khan, multimillionaire spiritual ruler of some 12,000,000 Ismaili Moslems in India and Africa, took a constructive attitude toward the postwar world by buying some new horses and lining up a new bride.* The pumpkin-shaped sportsman, now living in wartime exile in Switzerland, celebrated his colt Tehran's winning of the $22,000 St. Leger (rhymes with Dillinger) Stakes by buying several horses at England's famed Newmarket sales. The 67-year-old potentate also posted the banns for his fourth marriage (Begum No. 3 divorced him last year). His new intended is tall, black-haired, 38-year-old Yvette La Brousse, a "Miss France" of 1932.

Roger Dearborn Lapham, roly-poly mayor of San Francisco, raced his sedan through the city and across Golden Gate Park toward the University of California Hospital; in the back seat was his expectant daughter, Mrs. Ernst Ophuls, comforted by Mrs. Lapham. He got to the hospital's emergency exit in jig-time, only to find it locked, had to sprint up a flight of stairs to get the gate opened, then went off in search of hospital attendants. The stork won the race: when His Honor returned to the car, he found he was a grandfather for the tenth time.

Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr., who, in the course of denying that he had ever bet $1,000 on beating other Allied generals to Paris, also denied that he had ever seen a $1,000 bill (TIME, Sept. 18), drew the sympathy of some admirers in Fort Worth. They decided he should and would have one to wave at Berliners.

Questions & Answers

Oscar Levant, pianist-composer and brittle-brained, self-styled "lowbrow" quiz expert, became an ex-expert when he made an exit from Information Please. Said he: "I don't mind being off the show. I think it's anticreative. Now I can read things I don't have to remember. It was just like my first marriage. We were not only incompatible. We hated each other."

Carl Carmer, best-selling folklorist (Stars Fell on Alabama, Listen for a Lonesome Drum) went to court with Publishers Farrar & Rinehart to settle a baffling question: How big is a book? Author Carmer claimed that he had fulfilled his Farrar & Rinehart contract with a 40,000-word history of The Submarine Sturgeon, famed for Lieut. Commander William L. Wright's terse description of its baptism in battle: "Sturgeon no longer virgin." The publishers claimed that he still owes them a book because his submarine history was not "full-length." New York Supreme Court Judge Lloyd Church decided to let a jury decide the legal length of a full-length book.

Crime & Punishment

Sarah Bernhardt's 1918 recording of Prayer for Our Enemies, made when the late great queen of tragediennes was 73, was heard (over Station WMCA) by U.S. radio listeners for the first time. Excerpt: They have revived a brutal way of living--Of murder, and pillaging and fire . . . Their covenants they tear to tiny shreds. To Thee who knows their inmost rage and cunning We pray with anguished hearts and heads laid low. Thou who their inmost souls and thoughts can view, Forgive them not--they know well what they do.

William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England, was found by the Christian Century to have changed his mind about punishing Germany. At an earlier stage of the war it seemed to the Archbishop that "the peace terms must for a limited period include a penal element, if justice were to be done. But . . . those of us who believe that this intense bombing [of German cities] is justified as a military measure . . . must also recognize that it constitutes a penalty for German aggression so great that no other can be called for. . . ."

Going & Coming

Field Marshal Sir Bernard L Montgomery, on the road to Berlin, was wearing the same brown sweater he had worn on the road to Dunkerque in 1940--thanks to some Belgian monks who had found the sweater in the city of Louvain and kept it safe from moths and Nazis.

Raissa Irene Berkman Browder, Russian-born wife of U.S.-born Communist Earl Browder, finally became a legitimate alien immigrant eligible for U.S. citizenship, thus ending a four-year tug of technicalities over her illegal entry from Canada in 1933. The benevolent cooperation of immigration and consular officials ended her long dispute over her deportation (never enforced) by allowing her to re-enter the U.S. from Canada with a legally stamped visa.

Charles Augustus Lindbergh arrived in Manhattan, alone but not unremarked by news photographers (see cut), on his way from the South Pacific to his recently rented house in Connecticut (TIME, Sept. 18), still looking like the shy Lone Eagle who, 17 years ago, was all the world's hero.

Charges & Denials

The Marquise de Polignac, onetime Manhattan Socialite Nina Crosby, since 1917 wife of the master of France's great champagne house (Pommery), was jailed in Paris as an alleged collaborationist. To comfort her in her confinement, she had an air mattress on her bed, stores of cosmetics, plenty of clothes. She said she had driven an ambulance before the Nazis came, denied that she had been a collaborator, claimed to have won seven prisoners their freedom through her German embassy acquaintances.

Louis Renault, famed French automaker, wanted on charges of collaborating with the Nazis, was arrested in a Paris clinic where he said he was taking treatments. He denied that his firm had received $120,000,000 from the Germans for war materials, said that he had kept his huge, much-bombed plant going at the request of Vichy to keep its materials and equipment out of Nazi hands and to save workers from deportation. He was put in Paris' Fresnes prison.

Maurice Chevalier, reported killed by French Maquis (TIME, Sept. 4), wrote to his Parisian secretary that he is living in southern France, that "everything is O.K." and that he hopes his public will like the new songs learned during his "temporary seclusion."

*A U.S. lady tourist, on being asked her most thrilling sight in India, replied: "The Aga Khan by moonlight."

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