The Fuller Explanation

Tallulah Bankhead, an actress who revels in free speech ,but suffers "depression and melancholia" when she is misquoted, came around to admitting that she sometimes prefers misquotations. Unnerved after an unexpected mass interview with a dozen reporters in Manhattan's Stork Club, she confided to Columnist Leonard Lyons: "I suffer less when it's only the Times and the Herald Tribune, because then I know that if I should say 'godammit,' they would report that I had said 'good gracious.' "

Winston Churchill was rated the British Empire's No.1 cigar consumer (three an hour for 18 hours out of every 24). Said the rater, the pipe-smoking Earl of Halifax, Ambassador to the U.S.: "What he doesn't smoke, he eats."

Senator W. Lee ("Pappy") O'Daniell, Texas' professionally folksy hillbilly, rubbed jampacked Washington on its sorest nerve by buying a four-story, 14-farnily apartment house near the Capitol. Ordering eviction of all the outraged present tenants, Pappy explained: "Texans like a little room to move about. We don't like to be fenced in. I want ... a fair-sized home ... I can put a cookstove in."

And Now Goodbye

James Hilton, 44, British author of gentle, sentimental novels (Lost Horizon, Goodbye, Mr. Chips), now a Hollywood scripster, was sued for divorce (his second) by exActress Galina Kopineck Hilton, 42. The charge: extreme cruelty.

Technical Sergeant Charles E. ("Commando") Kelly, famed "one-man army" who knocked off 40 Nazis in a single

Italian engagement, decided to demobilize. Eligible for Army discharge as a Congressional Medal of Honor winner (see U.S. AT WAR), he said that he would apply after finishing his current War Loan tour.

Fleet Admiral Chester William Nimitz was found to have failed on one job: he did not instill his own qualities of cool calm-under-fire into his grey schnauzer pup, Mak--who heard Guam antiaircraft batteries open up in practice firing near the beach where the Admiral was swimming, took to the hills, was listed as missing.

Ups & Downs

Bess Truman stepped up to the honorary presidency of the Girl Scouts of America as Eleanor Roosevelt--joining

Grace Coolidge, Edith Wilson, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, Mary Lord Harrison and Frances Cleveland Preston--stepped down to an honorary vice-presidency.

The Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, 71, Britain's very "Red Dean" of Canterbury, was seized by high-spirited Russians as he emerged from a Moscow hotel on V-E day, got himself tossed high into the air. Said he shakily: "Thanks. Congratulations."

Rene Fonck, 50, World War I French Ace of Aces (75 German planes) and World War II Vichy collaborationist, tried out a new role. R.A.F. Sergeant George Cole, back from a parachute landing in Belgium, told the story. Knocked unconscious by his jump, Cole awoke in a monastery where he was silently waited on for three days by monks sworn to perpetual silence. Finally he was driven back to his base by a non-silent, keenly airminded monk who began questioning him closely about the air war. Flyer Cole said that his robed driver was ex-Flyer Fonck.

After Thinking It Over

Woodrow Wilson, contrary to popular legend, did not die heartbroken because the U.S. had refused to join the League of Nations. A 21-year-old family secret (on which his widow and Daughter Eleanor Wilson McAdoo first seemed at odds but later seemed to agree) was made public. The day before his death he said: "It was right that the United States did not join the League of Nations. ... It would not have worked, because deep down in their hearts the American people didn't really believe in it. The time will come when this country will join such a league, because it will know that it has to be. And then, and then only, will it work."

Commander Jack Dempsey returned from a three-months' tour of battlefronts for the Coast Guard to say that "strangely enough, in all my travels, I have not come across an outstanding fighter."

Mickey Walker, "Toy Bulldog" terror of the '203, back from six months of lecturing and bag-punching at U.S.O. camp shows in Africa and South America, said flatly: "The next heavyweight king will come from the services."

Robert Moses, boss of New York City's famed parkway system, who may not know all there is to know about esthetics but knows what he likes, bulldozed his way into art criticism: "God forbid that the atrocities of WPA art should be repeated after this war--stylized, symbolic, dehumanized people representing Fishing, Farming, Fire Insurance, Pan Americanism, Peace and Penicillin, who look as if a drunken woodsman had hacked them out of an old oak with a dull ax ... gaudy, abstract, geometrical horrors, distorted freaks, and barroom frescoes."

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