Yesterday & Tomorrow

Lincoln Ellsworth, 65, perennial polar explorer, was off again early in the first year of peace--perhaps the first robin of an old-fashioned explorers' spring. (Admiral Byrd had already begun to yearn aloud for the South Pole.) Explorer Ellsworth headed for the Rift valley volcanic areas in East Africa; after that, said he, would come the Antarctic again. "I just cannot keep away. . . ."

Quentin Reynolds, bestselling, high-living war correspondent (The Wounded Don't Cry), shed a public tear for war's freeloading days, recalled in Broadway's trade paper Variety* his eating & drinking with the French Army ("very good"), with the R.A.F. ("the drinks were very good"), with the U.S. Army ("excellent"). War correspondents are now hungry has-beens, he mourned: "We can be had cheap.. . ."

Myris Chaney, who caused a brief flurry of headlines in 1942 when she was taken up as a dancer by Eleanor Roosevelt and given an OCD job, was back in the news as a landlord. Now a milliner in San Francisco, she had solved her housing problem by buying an apartment building with her husband and moving in. Chaney & husband said they charged tenants the same old rent. OPA claimed an overcharge and sued for triple damages of $3,753.87.

The Duke of Windsor, who promised that the next time he saw London it would be with the Duchess, hopped over from Paris without her. He said something about getting some shirts mended, talked to his King brother, his old friend Winston Churchill, many another high-placed personage, and hopped back to Paris trailing clouds of speculation. Meantime in Paris his shocked valet de chambre scotched the tale of the shirt, informed reporters: "But really he would never think of having his shirts mended in London. This is the place for that. Why, in Paris the needlework is simply extraordinary."

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto actually never boasted that he would dictate peace in the White House--quite the contrary, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz reported; the sword-rattling Japanese Government had simply twisted Yamamoto's remarks. Said Nimitz: newly discovered Japanese documents prove that the Jap admiral was trying to warn his people that in any war on the U.S. "to make victory certain we will have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House."

Madame Butterfly hopefully braced herself for a comeback after wartime internment. With Lieut. Pinkerton she would make her postwar debut this week at the Metropolitan Opera, which tolerated her last in November 1941, then discreetly dropped her.

Testaments of Youth Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 76, philosophic champion of self-discipline and nonviolence, got fed up with the violently undisciplined enthusiasm of his Indian followers: it kept him awake. On a tour through India they cheered him at every train stop. Cried he: "I cannot repeat this performance for many days, and hope to live to the age of 125"--the age he thought he might reach before he saw "the consummation of my ideas." Observed the ascetic, sleepless, not unhumorous Mahatma: "To inculcate perfect discipline and non-violence among 400 million is no joke."

Jawaharlal Nehru, 56, Gandhi teammate in the fight for independence, drew a formal rebuke from some followers for contributing to a blood bank. His health, they protested, is "national wealth which should be preserved." He should really "abstain from such destructive sacrifices."

George Bernard Shaw, 89, faced with the problem of renewing a newspaper subscription, pondered his expectancy, renewed for two years.

Beauty & Health

Sadja Stokowski, 15, finally trailed Father Leopold into print with a picture taken at a yachting party at Palm Beach (see cut). The maestro's second daughter (by Wife No. 2), she threatened to out-glamor Glamor Girl Gloria, Wife No. 3.

Marika Rivera, another little-noted daughter of a much-noted man, also got her picture in the papers (see cut). A dancer, the shapely offspring of shapeless Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera, she turned up on the Riviera, got a little nonsensical publicity by trying on the shoulder pads of a footballer on the U.S. Air Forces all-star team.

Anita ("The Face") Colby, ex-Cover Girl No. 1, was named "the most beautiful woman in America." Picker: publicity-wise Harry Conover, Manhattan model-peddler. Also named: 1) Cinemactress Maureen O'Hara, "the perfect-feature girl;" 2) Ingrid Bergman (who acts for David Selznick, who employs Miss Colby as adviser), "the prettiest woman on the screen."

While he was about it, Modelman Conover revived the tried-&-true cry of the '20s: fashion designers were wrecking women's health by making them look like matchsticks. Promptly Designer Valentina got into the act: "Nonsense! . . . When the curves need correcting, the designer . . . corrects them. But never, never does she ignore them."

Flotsam & Jetsam

"The Four Hundred" was getting back into form of a sort. Saddened by the New York Social Register's elephantiasis, anonymous socialites (who seemed to favor the Newport set) prepared to sniff the Register out of countenance with the new Almanac of Society. Population: 500.

Like the Register's policy makers, the Almanac's refused to explain choices. But they were not, they insisted, motivated by any "sense of snobbishness or feeling of superiority."

John Jacob Astor, grandson of Mrs. William Astor, grande dame of the original Four Hundred, failed to make the grade. But ex-Wife Ellen Tuck French Astor made it, so did half-brother Vincent.

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt was in, his much-married mother, Margaret Emerson, was out.

Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., long banished from the Register, was now embraced by the Almanac.

John Hay ("Jock") Whitney, another of the Register's missing persons, also received shelter.

Not a Roosevelt was recognized, Democrat or Republican, Hyde Park or Oyster Bay.

Ward McAllister had dreamed up the Four Hundred in the first place, but in the Almanac the name McAllister nowhere appeared.

Behavior Patterns

Andre Siegfried, Frenchman-of-letters whose America Comes of Age sold nicely in the late '203, at a lecture in Paris announced yet again that the U.S. was coming of age. He also noted, as he had before the depression, "an atmosphere of prosperity."

Chicago's Mayor Edward J. Kelly, who all but eschews comic strips, and is no movie fan, did his ill-prepared best when he introduced visiting Colonel Philip Cochran to Chicago's city council. Beamed the mayor: "He is the Flip Corkin of the movie, The Tiger and the Pirates."*

Red Skelton, radio comic and firearms fancier, gave a lift to a hitchhiker who owned just the sort of gun Skelton wanted. At home the comic offered him $51. The stranger gladly took the money and departed, keeping the gun--with which he covered Skelton as he left.

Thurman Arnold, trust-busting ex-Assistant Attorney General, ex-judge, now a practicing Washington lawyer, was stolen blind by an irreverent chicken thief. From Arnold's backyard pen the bird fancier removed 19 chickens, one turkey--and killed and dressed them before departing.

*For news of Variety, see PRESS.

*Mayor Kelly was doubtless thinking of Willa Stockton Cather's famed short story, The Lost Lady or the Tiger.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.