Inklings

Walter Winchell, whose cry of "Thief!" at best-selling Anecdotard Ben nett Cerf (Try and Stop Me) has become a familiar theme in his column, turned out to be pasting up a jokebook of his own.

Source: old Winchell columns. Would he give credit where credit was due, when the jokes were not his? Publisher Simon & Schuster "thought so, wherever possible."

Leonard Lyons, who echoes Winchell in trying to raise a hue & cry against Cerf, was also at it himself. His own book would not give other jokesters credit, said he, because all the anecdotes* would be Lyons originals.

Kathleen Morris, whose California estates at Palo Alto and Saratoga used to crawl with celebrities (Alexander Woollcott, Harpo Marx, Edna Ferber, Irvin Cobb et al.) and nieces & nephews (including William Rose Benet's three by his first wife), sold her Palo Alto place for a reported $100,000. But she kept things fairly even by buying another place --something glassy and modern in San Francisco.

Birds of Passage

Mohandas K. Gandhi's youngest son Devadas flew into New York and bowed himself out of a place to lay his head. On a business trip for the Hindustan Times, Managing Editor Gandhi arrived from London at 2:59 a.m., heard that an extra hotel room was available to him, promptly turned it over to a roomless fellow passenger (female), then discovered that he had no extra room. After a small-hour tour of Manhattan on foot and by cab, he wound up in a barber shop at 8 a.m., at last got a room through a helpful fellow customer.

Paul V. McNutt, breezy High Commissioner to the Philippines, blew into Seattle (by way of Adak) on the wings of diplomatic singsong. "After Manila," he hummed, "this cool climate is wonderful." Then he added: "After Adak, this warm weather is wonderful."

Mary Pickford flew home from a European junket with some inside dope. Hitler, said she, was not dead at all, but hiding out in the mountains. She had it from a Berlin guide. She said United Artists (one-third owner: Miss Pickford) was having trouble casting One Touch of Venus. "You can't imagine Venus . . . speaking with a Southern accent, or a New England accent, or a Brooklyn accent," she explained, ". . . it must be absolutely pure English."

Annette Kellerman, who knocked another generation's hats off when she pioneered the one-piece bathing-suit, was back in the U.S. at 58 after years of residence in Australia. The famed bathing beauty arrived in San Francisco in unnatural silence and promptly dropped out of sight.

The Marquess of Queensberry, grandson of the man who is synonymous with boxing's rules, dropped into Manhattan "to see the fights"--the Woodcock-Mauriello go this week, the Louis-Conn go next month. The fiddle-fit Marquess, looking 30 at 50, came well-heeled: in either jacket pocket of his pin-stripe suit bobbed a bottle of 22-year-old Scotch.

Bernard Cardinal Griffin, Archbishop of Westminster, flew into New York for a fortnight's U.S. visit, was greeted by i) Francis Cardinal Spellman, 2) newsmen, who goggled at the visitor's British version (bowl-on-a-platter-style) Roman hat. Cardinal Spellman brightly declared that he would buy Cardinal Griffin a new one, U.S. style, later informed the press: "The matter has already been taken care of."

Apparitions

Jinx Falkenburg, cover girl turned actress, and now Mrs. John R. ("Tex") McCrary, expecting "any day in July," swore to do right by her offspring. "If it's a girl I'll call it Capri," said she. "Anyway, I won't use a name like Jinx."

Gypsy Rose Lee, dressed to the chin, prim as a nanny and starchy as a duchess, took the air in Chicago's Lincoln Park with Son Eric nestled in a "cuddleseat," gave her public something new to goggle at (see cut).

Grace Moore was goggleworthy herself in a photo that reached the U.S. from Rome last week (see cut). Occasion for the bubbly blonde soprano's somber wrap-up : an audience with Pope Pius XII. The onetime Baptist choir singer from Jellico, Tenn. had conversion on her mind.

Lola Ruddy, a Manhattan model,* hitched her wagon to a galaxy: since she was part Irish, part English, part French, part Portuguese, and part Swiss, she figured on claiming the title of Miss United Nations.

Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner gathered garlands of Mother's Day publicity: they made somebody's list of the "most glamorous mothers in the U.S."

Ladies' Days

Viscountess Alexander, wife of Canada's new Governor General, struck a blow for imperial clubbiness at the Royal Ottawa Golf Club. Her Ladyship teed off at the 146-yard sixth hole into a stiff wind, dropped a hole-in-one--the first of the club season and the first in her life.

Madame Quo Tai-chi of China, who (like all the U.N. delegates' wives in Manhattan) had been sent a basket of wine (four bottles) by a California vintner, responded with a womanly international gesture. To the pilot who had flown the wine from the Cresta Blanca vineyards she dictated her recipe for Chinese Burgundy: beaten whites two eggs, one pint Burgundy, dash vanilla extract, dash orange bitters; stir in the whites slowly.

Grace Coolidge, relict of the 29th President, kept a dinner engagement at the home of a Northampton, Mass, cobbler. As she presented pins to a class of nurses' aides, she had encountered a girl with an Italian name, promptly inquired whether the girl could cook spaghetti, soon got an invitation from the girl's parents. Mrs. Coolidge appeared at the Sam Borrelli home in good time, departed 4 1/2 hours later. "She ate slowly," reported Cobbler Borrelli, "and she ate a lot."

Helpmeets

Jay Gould III, 26-year-old great-grandson of the great manipulator, was sued for divorce on grounds of cruelty by Wife Jennifer, 21-year-old daughter of Cinemactor Nigel Bruce, after nearly two years of marriage, three months of paternity.

Artie Shaw, bandsman divorced in 1944 by Composer Jerome Kern's daughter, Elizabeth (Shaw's fourth), was ordered by a Los Angeles court to get up $4,000 back alimony--two months' payments.

W. T. Sutton, 74, Missouri's old-groom-of-the-season, said his 16-year-old Bride Vinnie had floWn the coop, after only two weeks. "She said she had a headache. . . ." reported Farmer Sutton.

Convalescents

Thomas Mann, after a chest operation at a Chicago hospital, was reported "doing very well."

Bidu Sayao, Brazilian operatic soprano, finally got around to having her tonsils out, in Ann Arbor, Mich. She would make her atonsillar debut at 39 in Philadelphia next week.

Lila Lee, doll-faced heroine of the silents, and off & on the theatrical comeback trail ever since, took it easy at a Saranac Lake, N.Y. tuberculosis sanitarium, said she was "doing beautifully," after nearly a year there, hoped to be back in Manhattan late this summer.

* One Lyons anecdote last week involved Poet Stephen Vincent Benet "at Cafe Society last night." Lyons got it straight later; Benet has been dead three years.

* And member of a once-famed family of swimmers and body-beautiful enthusiasts.

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