Health & Beauty

The Earl of Halifax, some 60 years away from childhood, came down with a childish illness at just the wrong time. Soon after Winston Churchill arrived for a stay, the Ambassador broke out with chicken pox. Churchill crossed his fingers.

Ernest Hemingway became a pin-up boy in earnest: popular-magazine illustrators Frederic Varady, Al Buell and Mortimer Wilson decided that the taurine author's head was one of the six "most startling and exciting heads in the world . . . faunlike." The other pre-eminent polls: Admiral William F. Halsey, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, U.A.W. Leader Walter Reuther, Cinemactor Tyrone Power, G-Man J. Edgar Hoover.

Lana Turner, curvaceous cinema-blonde, let go a couple of considered judgments after a Latin American tour. On Latins: they were "all they were supposed to be." On the Good Neighbor policy: "There should be a lot of it."

Lady Astor revised a simile, between visits to Savannah. She had compared the city to a "beautiful lady with a dirty face." Then Savannah cleaned up. Now, said she, it looked like a lady with not a curlpaper out of place.

Major General Charles P. Gross, chairman of New York City's Board of Transportation, preferred to be literal up to a point. "New York is by all odds the dirtiest city in the world," he declared. "You will find . . . more dirt than there is in Moscow, Copenhagen, Paris and Brussels combined."

In & Out

Lord Beaverbrook, Britain's Tory newspaper tycoon (Daily Express circulation, 3,442,366), hopped to the U.S. en route to Bermuda, behaved for all the world like a newspaper-hater. At LaGuardia Field newsmen got a quick "no comment" brushoff. The New York Times, which knows dignity when it sees it, headlined: LORD BEAVERBROOK ARRIVES, IN SILENCE.

Viscountess Furness, twin sister of Mrs. Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt* and aunt of Mrs. Stokowski, flew over from Britain for a month's stay in the U.S., said she was coming back later to settle for good. She put up for a while with Sister Gloria at her Manhattan apartment.

The trip, thanks to fellow-passenger Lord Beaverbrook, had been dandy. "He's such a nice man," said the Viscountess, "and he took such good care of me. He . . . kept giving all kinds of orders like 'Get a rug for Her Ladyship' and things like that. It was almost like old times when one had servants traveling with one."

Words & Music

Maurice Chevalier, still singing in a slanted hat, sharp tux and cocked eyebrow, and still France's No. 1 music-hall darling, set himself for a round-the-hemisphere tour in a one-man show. The greying song-&-dance man would tour the Alps first, then go to Buenos Aires and Rio, then hop to Canada. Then, if his plans panned out, he would do a coast-to-coast tour of the U.S.

Mistinguett, whose lyric legs drew ahs and ohs before Chevalier ever saw a razor, was finally being typecast. The ancient musicomedienne's next Paris show, hopefully titled Life Begins Tomorrow, would show her as an octogenarian.

Sacha Guitry, long Paris' No. 1 jack-of-all-theatrics, jailed for alleged collaboration and then given "provisional freedom," was finally freed for lack of evidence. But the high-living author-actor-producer-director, whose shows and marriages (four) had made him a symbol for scampish joie de vivre, was now a wreck. He looked nearer 70 than 60; his bounce was gone. In his museumlike Paris mansion, plastered with expensive paintings, wooded with statues, cluttered with showcases full of knickknacks (a finger ring of Flaubert's, a pocketbook of Napoleon's, a cast of Hugo's hand)--he hobbled about on a gold-studded cane.

Regarding his alleged collaboration: he thought he would do it all again. Said he, "I didn't want Paris to die. . . ." Besides, what else could he do? "When a German general or Otto Abetz knocks on my dressing-room door and I say, 'Entrez,' then see who it is, should I throw him out?" He thought he knew the trouble. "I have many enemies," said he. "I have written, directed and produced and starred in 114 plays, and the last one, N'Ecoutez Pas Madame, ran 600 consecutive performances. I made 23 million francs. People don't forgive that."

Swore Guitry: "I am not an envious man, but there is one person I envy--Dreyfus. He had Zola. I have nobody to defend me." Except himself. He had already begun to write his memoirs.

* Who refused to comment this week on a gossip-column report that she had pawned one of her rings to help meet expenses, though her secretary said it was so.

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