Home Folks

"I make the shrimp test," was the way General George C. Marshall's wife, Katherine, described one of her social duties. At parties she serves the Secretary of State as a sort of poison-taster, she explained. Anything with shrimp in it makes him pass out cold.

In Hollywood, Cinemactress Gene Tierney fell upstairs and broke a toe. Otherwise, everything moved according to custom.

Bandsman Tommy Dorsey let it be known, through his business representative, that he had separated from his second wife, Actress Pat Dane. Barrel-chested Cinemactor Brian Donlevy got a divorce after complaining that his wife 1) had been complaining for ten years, and 2) had been so busy for the past three years that he could never get a date with her. Greer Garson, 38, officially announced her separation from her second husband, Actor Richard Ney, 28 (who played her son in Mrs. Miniver). "Like many other married couples," Miss Garson observed, "we have had difficulties."

Teresa Wright (who played Ney 's bride in Mrs. Miniver) and Cinemauthor Niven Busch told the world they expected a child next October.

In Marseilles, angel-faced Actress Danielle Darrieux said she was now going to divorce Porfirio Rubirosa (who used to be Dominican charge d'affaires in Vichy) to marry her third, Actor Pierre Louis. When Husband Porfirio paid her a visit, "I made known to him my intention . . ." said she. "He accepted like a gentle-man." Plump, greying Columnist Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., 48, whose first, second and third marriages lasted, respectively", seven, three and six years, was now separated, after something less than six months, from beauteous Maria Feliza Pablos, 29-year-old grandniece of Mexico's late President Porfirio Diaz.

Dime-Store Heiress Barbara Mutton (first husband, Prince Alexis Mdivani; second, Count Court Haugwitz-Revent-low; third, Cinemactor Gary Grant) was back at the marriage-license bureau with another prince. Sharing the Swiss vistas with her in St. Moritz: tall, blond Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, leading candidate for No. 4.

Past Masters

Charles A. Lindbergh, in a week of plane crashes, took pen in hand to prove that, on a mileage basis, planes are safer than autos: "Why are there so many airline accidents? Because there is so much more flying. . . ."

Babe Ruth, in a Manhattan hospital ever since an operation on his neck last November, finally went home. In his famous camel's hair coat & cap he didn't look bad to the camera's eye (see cut), but two people helped him walk from the hospital entrance to his car. "I'm going home for a little vacation," he said. "... I want to look at the river. . . ."

Gadabouts

Crown Prince Saud Ibn Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia finished his cross-country tour of the U.S., prepared to head for home this week after a month's visit. Detroit, where Prince & party occupied two entire floors of a hotel, would not soon forget him. He saw the auto capital's numerous postwar wonders, but what he really wanted, he said firmly, was one of those good old 1936 Pierce-Arrows. His father's--very roomy and comfortable--was wearing out.

Vacationing in sporty St. Moritz, Switzerland, with the international set: Yugoslavia's ex-King Peter and handsome wife Alexandra. They were enjoying a little change from Monaco. Besides, they had had to get out because they could not get their visas renewed.

Music-lovers at Cairo's Opera House had trouble paying attention to the stage. Ablaze in a box were King Farouk's beauteous sisters Fawzia (Queen of Iran) and Faiza, looking, respectively, like the Dragon Lady and a Hudson's Bay Co. advertisement (see cut).

Abd el-Krim, bearded, limping Riff chief who nearly drove the Spaniards out of Morocco in the '20s (before France's Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, put in charge of combined Spanish and French forces, went down and whipped him), finally got the answer he wanted to a letter he has been sending to Paris every year. He could now get off Reunion Island, a muggy spot in the Indian Ocean to which he had been exiled (with two favorite wives and many relatives) back in 1926. Abd el-Krim decided to move to the French Riviera.

The Air is Filled With Music

Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz' wife, Catherine, played the piano at a benefit for Washington's National Symphony, but only as an accompanist. Soloist: the Nimitz' wonder-spaniel, Freckles, who gave Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms such a sensitive interpretation (see cut) that he had to do three encores.

Serge Koussevitzky, 72, the Boston Symphony's prestigious maestro for the past 22 years, went to court in Manhattan and gave a new publishing firm (Allen, Towne & Heath, Inc.) a blazing sendoff on its very first book. Title: Koussevitzky. Author: ex-Boston Music Critic Moses Smith. The maestro sued to stop publication. The book, he complained, "describes me as ... incompetent . . . brutal ... a poseur . . . attacks my integrity . . . impugns my loyalty and slanders a lifetime of work." Besides, complained the maestro, it might spoil the sale of a literary project of his own: the Koussevitzky autobiography.

A fire around dawn drove Musicomedy Writers Herbert & Dorothy Fields (Let's Face It, Annie Get Your Gun) out of their 18-room house in Brewster, N.Y. Some $15,000 worth of furnishings went up in flames, but rural firemen managed to save the house: the Fields had a full swimming pool left over from summer.

In trouble with the law was Trinidad's "King of Calypso," Edgar Leon St.-Clair (Stone Cold Dead in the Market). He was picked up in Brooklyn for failing to report to probation authorities (he has been required to report periodically ever since he opened his common-law wife with a can-opener back in 1942).

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