Fortune Hunters

Esther Williams, 22, hazel-eyed, streamlined Hollywood aquabelle, became an unwitting accessory to crime last week when one Allen Artenchuck confessed the theft of six reels of Esther's film, Bathing Beauty, from a Brooklyn theater on the grounds that "Esther Williams is the most gorgeous creature I have ever seen. When I could not have her, I made up my mind to get the film."

Father Day, rambunctious kingpin of Broadway's five-year-young Life with Father, fetched a record price to splutter in Technicolor for Warner Bros. Warners will give the owners (Mrs. Clarence Day, Producer Oscar Serlin, Dramatists Howard Lindsay & Russel Grouse) $500,000 down and half the gross, cannot release Father before 1947, must obey the owners' Ten Commandments (sternest commandment: thou shalt not film any script of which we disapprove).

Doris Duke Cromwell, whose Reno divorce from James H. R. ("Jimmy") Cromwell (null-&-voided by a New Jersey court) was upheld last week by a Reno judge, was dropped, together with ex-Husband Cromwell, by the stuffy New York Social Register's newly issued 1945 edition.

Familiar Faces

Major General Claire Chennault, hawk-eyed chief of the Fourteenth Air Force in China, publicly greeted Hollywoodians Jinx Falkenburg and Pat O'Brien, members of a U.S.O. troupe whose performance moved 20th Bomber Command enlisted men--hitherto highly critical of China-Burma-India theater performers-- to present them with a commendatory scroll.

Princess Elizabeth, 18, heiress presumptive to the throne of England, christened her first battleship, the mightiest ever built in the British Isles. The craft (name unrevealed, but "an honored one in British naval tradition") is supposed to be about the size of the U.S.'s new Iowa class battleships (world's largest), is expected to cut its teeth on the Japanese in the Pacific.

The Earl of Halifax, Britain's gaunt, impenetrably gentlemanly Ambassador to the U.S., deftly parried a U.S. housewives' rumor that Britain has used Lend-Lease lipstick to prettify English girls for lonely G.I.s. Said Halifax: "Lipstick [is] the easiest and quickest way to mark on a war casualty's clothes what and where his wounds are."

Frank ("The Voice") Sinatra, whose high-school playmates called him "Angles" because he knew all of them, figured a new one last week: his own music-publishing firm in Manhattan--an anchor to windward against the day when his bobby-soxed fans will be wearing garters.

Free Thinkers

George Bernard Shaw characterized World War II as "a mere Bubble in the froth of history," scorned the notion that a trial of Adolf Hitler would prevent future wars, predicted that the Fuehrer would probably end up in a vice-regal lodge in Dublin. As for women being able to do anything about keeping the peace, Shaw snorted: "Men are pugnacious and women are very, pugnacious."

Tallulah Bankhead, husky, loud-spoken actress who played the lead (1939) in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, took umbrage at Playwright Hellman's comment in Moscow: "An actor doesn't make much difference to the play" (TIME, Dec. 4). Quoth Miss Bankhead: "I loathe Lillian. ... A remark like hers is beneath the contempt of an actor. She doesn't know what she's talking about. I'd like to see what some of her plays would be like with a second-rate cast. ... Of course, she's really a wonderful playwright, and a good play that has a good part in it is awfully difficult to find. If Lillian had a good play right now, I'd do it--even though I hate her."

Nancy Astor, Britain's tart-tongued, opinionated, Virginia-born peeress-politico, first woman to sit in the House of Commons, announced that she would retire from 25 years of politics at term's end, confided, "I will not fight the next election because my husband does not want me to. ... I am bound to obey. Is not that a triumph for men?" Said, her husband, Lord Astor: "When I married Nancy, I hitched my wagon to a star. When she got into the House I found I had hitched my wagon to a sort of V-2 rocket! But the star which is Nancy Astor will remain a beacon light for all with high ideals."

Pope Pius XII spoke wise words: "In this grave moment radio can exercise the work of cohesion among the people, reconciliation and love among all nations, but in the hands of perverse men it can also transform itself into an instrument of hatred and ruin."

Norman Thomas, 60, good, greying, five-time Socialist Party candidate for President, pondering the meaning of his fifth defeat, saw no future for the Socialist Party, as a political force, predicted that "America is on the road to fascism, or a variant of fascism," prophesied that a coalition of progressive labor, farm, and regional groups (e.g., the New York Liberals and Wisconsin Progressives) was the U.S.'s only hope. Said Thomas: "That rules out, to take an extreme case, Sidney Hillman, or any such labor leader."

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