Hearts on the Sleeve

June Havoc, blonde, scene-stealing Broadway musicomedienne, invited to a destroyer launching by Navy Lieut. George Gay Jr.--only survivor of Midway-famed Torpedo Squadron 8--gaily stole the Navy's show. The ship had hardly been christened H. J. Ellison (in honor of the Squadron 8 hero) when June turned to her host and cried: "George, I love you so much!" George blushingly admitted to reporters that June was his "girl."

Count Alfred Marie de Fouguereaux de Marigny, acquitted of the 1943 Bahamas murder of his millionaire father-in-law, Sir Harry Oakes, turned up in Halifax as a third officer on a Canadian merchant ship, thought he might make the merchant marine his career. On his way to visit his wife, Nancy Oakes de Marigny, 20, he told reporters he wanted "privacy": "Until all this publicity I got when I came into Halifax, the crew respected me. Now . . . they want my autograph." The Count, who doesn't like to be called Count, asked to be "just plain mister," or "comrade."

William Randolph Hearst, 81 and agile, lauding his Boston newspapers (Record and American) for pulling through the February blizzard with a "really inspiring" production performance, confessed that he still found "glamor" in the newspaper business: "The old days were no better than the new days. I miss nothing except my own youth."

Eyes on the Future

Henry Agard Wallace, who takes his Government chores in dead earnest (to prepare for diplomatic visits he plunged into the study of both Spanish and Russian), buckled down to his job as Secretary of Commerce. Explaining that his Department "will be interested in the aviation industry" after the war, Wallace gave up his usual early morning tennis game, announced: "I intend to learn to fly just to find out what this private airplane business will be like."

George Herman ("Babe") Ruth, who has mostly watched baseball from the grandstand since his days as the "King of Swat," planned to launch a fresh career as a wrestling referee with an April 4 match in Boston, said he would go on a crosscountry tour if the new job pans out.

The Duchess de Talleyrand, 70, chic, spry daughter of the late financier Jay Gould, and a longtime (40 years) resident of prewar France, announced that she would auction off her famed collection of orchid plants--more than 5,000, valued at about $75,000--for the benefit of the Red Cross. In giving up the collection, which blooms in a two-block-long greenhouse on the Gould estate in Tarrytown, N.Y., the Duchess will save some 75 tons of coal for spring heating, can free nine gardeners for other work.

Sergeant Joe Louis, who left the prizefight ring in 1942 as undefeated heavyweight champion of the world, returned from an overseas tour with plans for his future. The Brown Bomber declared he would go back to boxing after the war, to defend his title "at least once."

Doris Duke Cromwell, sent to Egypt last year by the United Seamen's Service to run a merchant seamen's canteen, turned up in Rome with excited accounts of her travels: after six weeks in Alexandria, she had flitted to Italy, thence to Sardinia, where she ran a U.S.A.A.F. canteen. Now in Rome, she was pulling wires --so gossips said--to get to England, where a mysterious romance waited. Offered a job by Hearst's I.N.S. Rome office as a war correspondent, Doris said yes. But the War Department firmly said no.

Just Deserts

Ingrid Bergman, Sweden's second gifted gift to Hollywood, won the award for best cinema actress of 1944 for her performance in Gaslight. The year's best picture, Going My Way, drew Oscars for Best Actor Bing Crosby, double-threat star of radio and cinema (see RADIO), for Barry Fitzgerald as best supporting actor, and twice-Oscared Leo McCarey, for best directing and authoring the best original story. Lauding McCarey for helping "a broken-down crooner ... to win," Actor Crosby quipped: "Now if he'd find me a horse to win the Kentucky Derby, it would be the greatest parlay in history." Also be-Oscared: Ethel Barrymore, best supporting actress (None but the Lonely Heart); Margaret O'Brien, best child actress. Wartime note: Oscars, instead of the usual gold plate, were made of lacquered plaster.

Harry Truman recalled the old teachings of Kansas City's now defunct Pendergast machine, which pushed him into big-time politics: never forget a friend or an enemy. When Attorney General Biddle began to consider a fourth-term renomination for Maurice Milligan, U.S. attorney in Kansas City who sent platoons of Pendergast henchmen to jail for vote frauds, Harry Truman balked, told newsmen he preferred a friend in Milligan's place. Pressed for a further reason, the Vice President, who had campaigned for Term IV for Franklin Roosevelt, explained: "[Milligan's] been in office twelve years and that's long enough."

Captain Jonathan Wainwright 5th, son of the Japs' No. 1 U.S. prisoner of war, and a veteran of the U.S. Merchant Marine since 1933, was decorated with the Mariner's Medal for injury received in enemy action.

Marguerite ("Missy") Le Hand, the President's longtime confidential secretary who died last year, made provision in her will for both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. They were free to choose whatever furnishings they wanted from her White House suite, one book each from her library.

Cordell Hull, 73, who quit his $15,000-a-year job as Secretary of State because of ill health, landed on another Government payroll. As long as he was working for the Government, ex-Captain Hull of the 4th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry (which saw service as a pacification force in Cuba) had declined to accept his over-age-65 pension. But after his resignation, Hull applied, now receives his $75 a month along with almost 130,000 other Spanish-American War veterans.

Sherman Billingsley, suave, sleepy-eyed host of Manhattan's Stork Club, accepted congratulations from cafe society as the author of a 6,000-word history of nightclubs, to be printed in the next edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica--which is noticing nightclubs for the first time in 177 years of publication. Pocketing his $120 (the scholar's rate of 2-c- a word) Author Billingsley lost no time about getting in a professional plug: "Nightclubs are here to stay. Curfews and taxes can't kill them . . . even the Britannica has come to realize. . . ."

Calm and Troubled Minds

Booth Tarkington, 75-year-old, two-time Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist and connoisseur of art, who summers at Kennebunkport, Me., attacked the Kennebunkport post office mural, an old WPA project depicting bulgy bathers on a beach. Author Tarkington regarded the work as "painful to Kennebunkport's old timers. Why, Kennebunkport doesn't even have a bathing beach."

Gualberto Villarroel, handsome, soldierly President of Bolivia, motored with his family past some hitchhikers, drew up short when a bullet whanged through his car door. Police found the Villarroels unhurt. When the suspected assassins turned out to be workers on a spree, they were released with a practical Latin explanation: "No connection with politics. Just drunks."

Lieut. Stephen Early Jr., 21-year-old son of the President's No. 1 secretary, abed with wounds in a European hospital, got a surprise visit from his father, in Europe on an Army public-relations mission.

Winston Churchill growled like an angry bulldog when Laborite M.P. Richard Stokes accused him of lying to the House of Commons (in a flowery praising of British tanks), demanded that Stokes "repeat his exact words," appeared mollified when Stokes substituted for the word "lie" the Victorian phrase, "terminological inexactitude."

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