Virtuosos

Life was dealing pretty severely with the glamor girls--and vice versa.

Overworked Singer Lily Rons checked in at a Manhattan hospital for a good rest and thorough checkup.

Ecdysiast Georgia Sothern managed to stay out of the hospital, but just barely. She reported for work at Boston's famed, faded Old Howard with a bunged-up brow, a bruised caboose, and a shocking tale. On the street the night before, said she, three strange men "appeared out of nowhere" and gave her a working-over. "So you would go to a nightclub?" cried one, and belted her in the forehead. (She had not been to any nightclubs, said red-haired Miss Sothern.) The other two walloped her on the crown, booted her from behind, chucked her into a doorway. Miss Sothern declared she didn't know what it was all about. As soon as she reached her hotel, she telephoned her estranged husband in Manhattan, who said he didn't know what it was all about either.

Wagnerian Soprano Kirsten Flagstad came to grips with the postwar world in Paris. For her first big postwar concert outside Norway (where her husband died in prison, charged with collaboration), she was booked into the theater where ex-Vichyman Alfred Cortot had played the piano to mixed cheers and boos (TiME, Jan. 27). When Flagstad walked onstage, the crowd was silent a moment--then broke into applause. To more applause, and tumultuous cheers, she sang some Grieg songs, and excerpts from Wagner in German. Said Flagstad, heading for London: "My conscience is clear."

White-haired Dancer Ruth St. Denis, celebrating what she chose to call her "70th rebirthday" in Los Angeles, reported joyfully that she was founding a Church of the Divine Dance. "People mustn't think this is a phony," said she. "I am an Episcopalian." This church, however, would be "universal, nonsectarian." Dancer St. Denis hoped to get ministers in to preach guest-sermons; she would preach herself; and she and a "rhythmic choir" would explain things further by dancing.* Mystical-minded, dead-earnest St. Denis had often toyed with such a project before, but nothing much ever came of it. "I want now to work for God and nothing else," said she. ". . . Joyously I will dance the measures of the Eternal music, and the Geometry of God will come through. ... A great change has come into my life. . . ."

VETERANS

Charles Spencer Chaplin gave the public a preview peek at himself in what looked like the nattiest role of his career (see cut). His long-planned comedy about a Bluebeardish M. Verdoux who marries and murders for money (leading lady: Martha Raye) would finally be out in March, and Producer-Actor Chaplin was moved to a program note: "Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension of diplomacy; M. Verdoux feels that murder is the logical extension of business." Bessie Love, sweet-faced young thing of the silents, complained that her ex-husband, Producer William B. Hawks, had fallen down on his support payments, sued him for $34,561.

Conrad Nagel, 49, lambent-eyed film stalwart, was sued for divorce by 23-year-old Actress Lynn Merrick, who had stuck with him for not quite a year. She explained: "It was just a case of incompatibility. ... I lost ten pounds. . . ." An accounting of the late William S. Hart's estate added it up to $1,044,919.

The old cowboy hero's only child, William Jr., promptly sued to break the will, which had left him nothing. He charged that Father William had been "mentally incompetent."

LITERATES

Poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning got a shy tribute in Ledbury, England.

What remained of Hope End, her childhood home, had been bought by a local fruit farmer who now proposed to restore it. He would maintain it as a literary shrine, although he had never read any of her poetry: "I wouldn't understand it. ... It's beyond the brain of a fruit grower."

Ex-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. suddenly found an unexpected demand for his literary chef-d'oeuvre, though he had bound only 872 volumes of it (not for sale at bookstores), and still had 20-odd to go. The demand for his blow-by-blow Washington diary, monumentally documented (TIME, Jan. 13), came from Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder. Snyder said he wanted it back; it was public property.

In Hartford, Conn., German-born Richard Julius ("Jan Valtin") Krebs, ex-Communist bravo whose bloody Out of the Night was a prewar bestseller, got his U.S. citizenship papers. In San Francisco, best-selling Philosopher Lin Yutang's 14-year-old daughter, Yu Hua, got into the U.S. on a visitor's permit--after a slight delay. The local immigration man claimed he had a "confidential" tip that she intended to stay for good, kept her aboard ship for two days & nights, finally took a chance and let her in.

Novelist Louis Bromfield was having international trouble, too. One of the Parisian characters in his three-year-old What Became of Anna Bolton was a "Madame Ritz . . . widow of the great Cesar Ritz. . . ." He called her "a great woman," but he let her die. Last week alive-&-kicking Marie Ritz,* 79-year-old widow of the luxury-hotelman, sued Bromfield and his publishers for invasion of privacy. She noted that she had been "portrayed as dying," complained she was "being subjected to ridicule, humiliation, embarrassment and annoyance ... all to her damage in the sum of One Hundred Thousand ($100,000) Dollars."

Erskine Caldwell, ribald explorer into the itchy side of the South, was enjoying a crashing success in Denver with his 14-year-old God's Little Acre. The pocket edition (25-c-) was fetching $5 on the black market, and bookstores were sold out of the regular edition. Responsible for the boom: the head of the police Morals Bureau, who suppressed the 25-c- Acre because "it was too easy for kids to get it." Did he find the book obscene? "No comment," said he.

*Erroneously reported dead in 1942 news stories.

MUSCLES

Clean living made all the difference.

In Berlin, fierce-browed ex-Heavyweight Champion Max Schmeling, who had been training all winter, was cleared in the British zone of having Nazi connections. It meant that he could now fight in the U.S. zone--or even in the U.S., if he cared to try.

In Beverly Hills, Alfred Letourner, onetime French cycling champ--who got a $200 fine last November for. knifing an ex-lady-friend in the hip--got 180 days in jail for 1) shouting and beating on the doors of her house one day, 2) bursting in one night and flinging himself on her while she was trying to get dinner. (Her husband flung him back out.)

* At Manhattan's Church of St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie some 20 years ago, the Rev. Dr. William Norman Guthrie used to have eurythmic dancers in to help out.

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