Old Complaint

House Speaker Joseph W. Martin Jr.'s office staff proudly reported that since the boss took over in January he had had five marriage proposals, by mail, from complete strangers. But Bachelor Martin, who is 62 and lives in a hotel, was not having any.

Barbara Hutton, 34, was having some more despite her famed swearing-off statement of last April. ("You can't go on being a fool forever," she said then.) The synthetically svelte, fashionably deadpanned heiress married her fourth in a snowy Swiss town. At the start it was rather picturesque and dashing. (She added an extra dash of the picturesque by screwing up the famed deadpan for photographers.) The groom was a Lithuanian prince* --handsome Igor Troubetzkoy. Trotting about like a jolly uncle who knows how to handle these things was International Playboy Freddie McEvoy, who a lot of people used to think would marry the heiress himself.

The party had hired a cab in Zurich, and gaily roller-coastered 60-odd miles through the Alps to Chur. The ceremony itself was an intimate ten-minute affair at the local registry office. The wedding feast: coffee and cakes in a patisserie. Then back by cab to picturesque Zurich. Then off to Bern and the Hotel Bellevue.

Heiress Hutton had developed the snuffles. Presently a doctor was summoned. The bride took to bed with a cold, and Igor got an offer from Hollywood.

"What sort of a woman is Barbara, anyway?" demanded the Prince's mother, Princess Katherine, back home in Nice. She was not optimistic: "I've always been afraid of American women."

The Red & The Black

The late J. P. Morgan, whose name, to most people, connotes enormous wealth, turned out to have left a net estate of only $4,642,791. The first appraisal since Morgan's death in 1943 showed that he had actually left $16,021,482, of which taxes gobbled up nearly $9,500,000. Morgan had planned it that way. He had given away more than $50,000,000 in driblets ($14,750,000 to the Pierpont Morgan Library, $14,810,340 to needy relatives, etc.) just to keep things "manageable."

This may or may not have surprised Clark Gable. Possibly moved to speak by the approach of income-tax day, the Grand Old Man of handsome young men declared that any year he cleared more than $1,000 he felt lucky. He understood that he was getting $6,000 a week at the moment, but: "A single man pays out almost 90% of it for taxes. . . . My agent gets 10 . . . my business manager. . . ." He wasn't complaining, understand--"but people have the wrong idea about movie salaries. . . ."

Lost, somewhere in Hollywood: Dorothy Lamour's $1,100 cigaret case. Identifying marks: 30 diamonds, 50 rubies.

Rosemary & Rue

The Right Rev. Ernest William Barnes, lean, long-nosed Bishop of Birmingham and famed low churchman, is as strong for euthanasia as he is against transubstantiation. Last week the opinionated Lord Bishop told his fellow Britons that the nation's woes will keep on growing because "the social services preserve the lives of babies of bad stock. Statistics show that the proportion of dullards and feeble-minded is definitely greater than a generation ago. . . . In the recent war . . . the birth rate--often illegitimate from irresponsible and undesirable parents --was large. [And] many . . . talk as though it were possible to grow grapes of thorns and figs of thistles. . . ."

In the dregs of London's bitterest winter, the air, for one day, was redolent of rosemary. Half of backstage Britain milled into the "actors' church" (St. Paul's, Covent Garden) in loving memory of the late great Shakespearean Actress Dame Ellen Terry, who had been dead these 18 years. She would have been 100 now, had she lived. Dame Sybil Thorndylce, Dame Edith Evans and Peggy Ashcroft read Shakespeare sonnets; Sir Ralph Richardson read the lesson. From the U.S., Ellen's grandnephew, Actor John Gielgud (see THEATER), short-waved some Cymbeline: "Fear no more the heat of the sun. . . ." Britain's newspapers, picking up the scent, bayed exquisitely. But George Bernard Shaw, with whom Ellen had had a correspondence-course love affair some 50 years ago, kept commemoratively mum.

New Note

Few singers had ever suffered such a drawn-out build-up before a professional debut as Soprano Margaret Truman. Off & on for nearly two years, newspaper readers had been reminded that she wanted to be a singer, that she hoped to sing in opera. Last week the suspense suddenly promised to be short: a surprise announcement that Margaret would sing on the radio with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra was made only three days in advance. Then Margaret got laryngitis; the debut was off for another week.

In Manhattan, Violinist Yehudi Menuhin prepared an extra, added attraction for the audience at his joint concert this week with his pianist sister, Hephzibah. Veterans who remembered him as a fat-cheeked boy prodigy would now encounter something Mephistophelean, if Hephzibah would just let it alone.

* No. 1 was Georgian Prince Alexis Mdivani; No. 2, Danish Count Court Haugwitz-Reventlow; No. 3, Cinemactor Cary Grant.

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