Figments

Alice was about to move in with a new family. The famed Lewis Carroll Wonderland manuscript, whose sale at public auction in 1928 set a new manuscript high ($75,259), will be auctioned for the second time next fortnight in Manhattan. Alice lived for 65 years with the real-life Alice (the late Alice Pleasance Har-greaves), then went at auction to Bookman Dr. Abraham S. W. Rosenbach, who shortly sold her to Victor Talking Machine Co. Founder Eldridge R. Johnson, who died last November.

Hamlet strode into a new Broadway record. Edwin Booth had played him in Manhattan for 100 performances; John Barrymore had perversely made the record 101 after a delegation of Bootholaters begged him to stop at 99. Maurice Evans hit 102 last week and kept on loping.

Romeo & Juliet turned out to be the victims of color prejudice. Broadway Director Harry Wagstaff Gribble saw it that way, and so prepared to produce the tragedy with colored Capulets and white Montagues. The new Juliet: beauteous Hilda Simms, currently the title-role streetwalker in Anna Lucasta.

Struggling Authors

Fiorello LaGuardia, old-scold columnist for 1) PM, 2) Sachs Quality Stores, tired of having his Sachs column rejected by Manhattan papers,* wrote something different, prayed in print: "I hope no fault will be found with it." Bulk of his column: Little Bopeep, Sing a Song of Sixpence, three other nursery favorites. That got printed--except by the Daily News.

Ezra Pound got into a Random House poetry anthology that had excluded him as a traitor, but Publisher Bennett Cerf took pains to be understood. He had finally decided, said Cerf in his Saturday Review of Literature column, to reinstate the poet, chiefly because: "Once begun, where can you draw the line in this sort of thing? . . . This does not mean," Cerf hastened to say, "that my abhorrence for Ezra Pound the man has abated one iota. . . ." To make assurance doubly, sure, Cerf would run a footnote characterizing Pound as "a contemptible betrayer of his country."

Lookers

Joan Crawford, who had just won her first Oscar, sued to divorce her third husband. Actors Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Franchot Tone had each lasted almost four years. Actor Philip Terry and she separated last December after three years and five months. Said she, he was cruel and inhuman.

Madeleine Carroll, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor (for Red Crossing), was sued for divorce after four years by Stirling Hayden, holder of Yugoslavia's "Order of Merit to the People" (for running arms to the Partisans through the Adriatic blockade). Wartime duties had kept them apart.

Jane Russell, hypermammiferous comeon for The Outlaw (see CINEMA), bravely bounced into a personal-appearance tour with the movie she made five years ago, but somehow the spontaneity was gone. At a Chicago cocktail party, swarming newsmen found her just as advertised. Miss Russell informed them: "I'm sick of talking about myself." On her movie: "They should have let Billy the Kid lie where he was." She eyed her admirers, observed: "How they drool."

Rita Hay worth got the season's least astonishing tribute. Members of the Society of Illustrators thought & thought, decided that she might safely be judged "one of the most seductive women in America."

Glorias

Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt was getting nothing . . . nothing . . . for her wretched years of motherhood. She had been forced to sell a $75,000 diamond for $30,000. She was reduced to living in a $175-a-month Manhattan apartment. Last week tradesmen were boldly presuming to offer her jobs--the tabloid New York Daily News announced, with a frightful leer, that Reggie Vanderbilt's 40-year-old widow had been asked to peddle phonograph needles at "$50 a jab." And to make it all practically unendurable, her own daughter, Gloria Vanderbilt Stokowski, with a fortune of $4,500,000, refused to give her a penny. Things hadn't been so embarrassing since the time, twelve years ago, when she was loudly called unfit, and lost custody of Gloria. The tabloids made the most of it.

Then daughter Gloria, in Mexico with her silver-haired maestro (a man old enough to be her father), chose to suggest that her mother work for a living, and told the press what she was doing with her mother's former allowance of $21,000 a year. She was giving it to blind, homeless, needy children, "because I had an unhappy childhood." Cried Mrs. Vanderbilt: "Disgraceful!"

Fanciers General Dwight D. Eisenhower &

wife prepared to eat a fancy dish. En route to their table in Washington, as part of some fund-raising whoop-de-do in Houston, was a Texas capon that had recently won a stock-show championship. Value: $1,200.

Harold Callender, tweedy world-weary veteran correspondent for the New

York Times, cabled home a hot discovery from "Somewhere in the South of France" --a discovery "not quite equal to that of the atomic bomb, yet [of] special significance for all civilized humanity. . . ." His discovery: "just about the best restaurant in a muddled world." He excitedly reported "a foie gras such as I have not tasted since Hitler attacked Poland, an omelette Perigoitrdine not to be found anywhere else in Europe, a brochette de rognons that would knock Monsieur Brillat-Sava-rin's eye out. . . ." He kept the location secret, said he, because "officially speaking, it is not correct to eat well today in this country. . . ." His happy conclusion: "Whatever has happened to France . . . she has not lost the art of cooking."

Elders

James J. Jeffries, 70, turn-of-the-century heavyweight champ, recovered from a stroke in a Burbank, Calif, hospital, smoked cigars in bed.

Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, 83. president emeritus of Columbia University, sent shocking regrets to a luncheon party for Winston Churchill. Explained Dr. Butler: he had lost his sight. His doctors blamed it on "70 years of overwork."

Senator Kenneth McKellar, 77, happily availed himself of one of the cozier privileges of his pro-tern presidency of the Senate. The sulphurous, cob-nosed bachelor from Tennessee greeted visiting Gwin Barnwell, the South's "Cotton Maid," with a painstaking buss.

Mrs. George S. Patton Jr.'s So-year-old brother, Charles F. Ayer, Boston financier and sarsaparilla heir, prepared to marry 40-year-old Miss Anne Phillips, who used to work in his office.

William Randolph Hearst, 82, seemed to be getting all set. Columnist Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. snooped around San Simeon, Calif., reported workmen building "an atomic cellar for the stooped old gent to disappear into when the next great war comes along. . . ."

Clarence Darrow, dead these eight years, failed for the eighth time to keep an annual appointment. He had promised amateur magician Claude Noble to "manifest himself" if he could. Noble stood on a Chicago bridge from which Barrow's ashes had been scattered, held up a picture, waited for Darrow to knock it out of his hand. It was no go.

*The Times explained its one rejection: we don't print libel.

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