Fighting Folk

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek made the biggest New Year's resolution of them all, promised his people constitutional government, not within a year after the end of hostilities, but before the war's end.

General George Catlett Marshall took time out from military affairs to purchase 17-year-old, nine-room Liscombe Lodge in Pinehurst, N.C., planned to spend his winters there after the war (see below).

General Peyton Conway March, wrinkled, spade-bearded, soldier-straight, World War I U.S. Chief of Staff, who said on his 79th birthday last year that an Allied victory in Europe in 1944 was "not in the cards," reached 80 and sounded off again. "There is no escaping the fact that the situation [Rundstedt's attack] is very serious. . . . Our intelligence service broke down completely. They appear to have been unaware of a German force of 200,000 men. . . . Imagine the population of Richmond [200,000] being assembled across the Potomac and we not knowing about it." Asked to predict the war's end, he snorted: "Well, I no longer count by anything but decades. So come back on my 90th birthday and I'll tell you."

Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower, visiting her son, 2nd Lieut. John Eisenhower, at Fort Benning, Ga., discoursed upon her favorite subject--her husband, the General. Said she: "This is everybody's war. Alone, no one man can win it. Ike has always felt . . . that a leader is only as good as the men he leads. His statement of 'unshakable faith in the cause for which we fight came from the very bottom of Ike's heart. ... I know Ike. He is calm and sincere--he keeps calm command of the most complicated situations."

Show Folk

Enrico Caruso Jr., 39, sometime playboy, onetime cinema bit-player, vocalist, who resembles his late, great tenor father in name only, announced that he would begin singing for his supper soon in Buffalo and Detroit nightclubs.

Russel Crouse, half of the witty, successful playwriting-producing team of Lindsay & Crouse (Life with Father, Arsenic and Old Lace), in Baltimore trying out a new show (The Hasty Heart), exploited his versatility by subbing for a stormbound bagpipe player, imitated the bagpipe's wheeze until the fellow showed up.

Charles Spencer Chaplin, defendant in the paternity suit (TIME, Jan. 1) brought by his onetime protegee Joan Berry, was conspicuously absent from the Los Angeles courtroom when Miss Berry's bush-browed Lawyer Joseph Scott, 77, roared his final plea to the jury. Samples: "This pestiferous, lecherous hound. . . . I'm sorry he isn't here so I could . . . hand it to him right on the chin. . . . Did you ever hear the story of Svengali and Trilby? This fellow is just a little runt of a Svengali. He's not even a monster . . . just a little runt. . . . This fellow doesn't lie like a gentleman. He lies like a cheap Cockney cad. ... That man goes around fornicating . . . with the same aplomb that the average man orders bacon and eggs for breakfast. He is a hoary headed old buzzard . . . with the instincts of a young bull ... a master mechanic in the art of seduction. . . ."

William S. ("Wild Bill") Hart, long, lean, hell-for-leather hero of the silent films, gave his old home in Hollywood to the municipality for a park and museum (name: the Bill Hart West Hollywood Park), donated $50,000 for its improvement, told a crowd assembled for the occasion that he had recently had a dream in which Will Rogers beckoned him into the saddle of his late famed pinto, Fritz, for the last roundup.

Gertrude Stein, 70, granite-faced, grey-haired, Pittsburgh-born literary expatriate, her poodle Basket, and her companion Alice B. Toklas, returned to their Left Bank Paris apartment after four years at their occupation home in Culoz in eastern France. Of her refusal to flee France, Miss Stein observed: "What's the use of going away? If there's to be a war, let's be in it." She also revealed that she has written a one-act tragedy, In a Garden, for children. It has three characters: a girl named Lucy Willow; two boys named Philip Hall and Kid Raccoon who battle each other to death. Sample dialogue:

Lucy: I am thinking how to be a queen. I am not thinking about how to be a princess. I am thinking about how to be a queen. I am thinking not about being Lucy Willow but how to be a queen.

Philip: Be a queen. Be a queen.

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