Blossom by Blossom

It was spring all right. Ethel Barrymore, 67, picked the St. Louis Cards and the Boston Red Sox to win pennants again. Actress Jinx Falkenburg was crowned 1947 Radio Sweater Girl by the National Knitted Outerwear Foundation, which picked Nina Foch as Hollywood Queen. The New York Yankees crowned Operatic Soprano Helen Traubel Miss Symphonic Matinee of 1947 and gave her an autographed baseball. Veteran Muralist Dean Cornwell reported after a coast-to-coast tour that in good looks "suburban girls lead city girls," and have "better developed breasts, more streamlined figures ... a lasting, healthy bloom to their skin. . . ." Sweden's 88-year-old King Gustaf moved down to the French Riviera for the sun & fun. Arid in Britain's House of Lords, Christopher Maude Chavasse, one-legged Lord Bishop of Rochester, plugged for a ban on liquor in workers' restaurants on the ground that young couples "do not want their courting in public houses ; they want the ordinary tea shop." Lord Latham retorted that he was "not convinced that you can carry out a more colorful courtship in a tea shop, even though it be called 'Ye Ancient Tea Shoppe.' " The Lord Bishop lost.

The Literary Life

Edward J. Flynn was joining the immortals. To a Manhattan publisher from the onetime Democratic national chairman went the manuscript of his memoirs, nostalgically titled: You're the Boss.

British Satirist Evelyn Waugh, who went to Hollywood on an eiderdown dream mission, departed for home after seven weeks of good living. By contract, M-G-M had maintained him in luxurious style while they talked about filming his Brideshead Revisited. But the censors wanted to change a script that Waugh liked. So it was no go. He didn't want changes. He really wasn't "keen" now to sell the book to any studio, said he.

Hollywood? "It's a place for very, very old people to go and die," said Waugh. Everything is just imitation except the cemeteries. "They are the only real thing ... I spent most of my spare time in the cemetery. I very much enjoyed Forest Lawn. I loved the music. . . ." Now, aglow with the memory of one of California's most sumptuous spectacles, he planned a sort of novelette with a cemetery setting. A poet who flops as a writer for the cinema (British, said Waugh) gets a job in a dog cemetery. He falls for a girl who works as a cosmetician in a mortuary for humans. She discovers that he works in a dog cemetery and throws him over for a mortician who works at her place. So the poet kills her, cremates her, and plants her in the dog cemetery.

To Have & Have Not

Reunited: Cinemactress Ilona Massey and her very motherly-looking mother, Mrs. Lydia Hagymasy, who arrived from Budapest; after ten years; at New York's LaGuardia Field. Actress Massey was having a full week: she had just appealed to Washington to let her Aunt Terez stay in the U.S., and she was about to marry Tier third husband.

Stolen: Marlene Dietrich's jeep; from outside a Paris hotel. Chin up, she told the press she would try to get another: "A jeep is . . . a sentimental thing to me. . . ."

Found: Lieut. General Lucius D. Clay's limousine; in a Czechoslovakian border village; two weeks after it was stolen from a Berlin A.M.G. parking lot. The culprits, vowed police, would be apprehended any minute now.

Stolen: armfuls of Tallulah Bankhead's flowers from admirers; on opening night in Manhattan. "I saw a strange man in my dressing room," Tallulah recalled later, "but I didn't think anything of it."

New Approaches

Andrei Y. Vishinsky, Soviet Vice Foreign Minister, told newsmen visiting Moscow the assets a good newspaperman must have: "Strong legs--first to catch the man he wants to interview, and secondly to run away from the man after he has printed it."

The late Thomas A. Edison, in a penciled memo sold at auction for $230 last week in Philadelphia: "As to the atom, I do not believe it has any internal energy as claimed. Everyone else believes it has."

Max Baer, ex-heavyweight-champ-turned-comedian, visited Indianapolis in his camel's hair coat, dropped in on an old sparring-partner-turned-evangelist, was shortly lifting his voice to lead 5,000 people at Cadle Tabernacle through Rock of Ages and There Is No Night There. Explained Max: "There's a little bit of good in all of us."

Oscar-Winner Olivia de Havilland told an interviewer that she had been reading a lot of books between scripts and had made a discovery: "It's the adjectives that count."

Old Hands

Tennessee's Senator Kenneth D. McKellar, 78, one of the capital's specialists in bussing pretty girls for the photographers, got a grip on Hilma Seay, 1947 Maid of Cotton, and went into his specialty (see att). The kiss brought her no luck: she was about to take off for France when news came that a dock fire at Le Havre had destroyed $2,000,000 worth of U.S. cotton she was going over to welcome.

Bernard Baruch, who has been photographed a lot in his 76 years, posed with Herman Baruch, 74, who has not done much posing, but who obviously should have (see cut). The splendidly dressed occasion: Brother Herman's oath-taking in Washington as new U.S. Ambassador to The Netherlands.

Discovered living in the French village of Matour was another old favorite: Spanish Dancer Caroline Otero, once the idol of a dozen capitals and a good many capitalists. Oftenest-told tale of "La Belle Otero" is that Belgium's Leopold II once put her up as stakes in a gambling game with England's Edward VII, lost, and paid. Now in her 70s, still tall and stately, Caroline lives quietly in a small house on an allowance from an old admirer. "I spent the weekend regularly with Edward VII," she reminisced happily last week. "The Kaiser Wilhelm was so much in love with me he was crazy. . . ."

The Questing Heart

The well-heeled strove, in various ways, for contentment.

Mrs. Anna Dodge Dillman, who was left some $50,000,000 by her late automaking husband, Horace E. Dodge, and then married Broadway Actor Hugh Dillman (since become a noted Palm Beach host), finally sued him for divorce after 21 years of war & peace.

Robert Goelet, socialite Manhattan banker whose 50-room Newport mansion was a local showplace (and, at taxpaying time, a bottomless rathole), finally gave it away--to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, for a girls' college.

Billy Rose, Broadway showman-columnist, who got a look at postwar Europe on a junket about a year ago, decided to import 25 war orphans and raise them on the 125 acres he added last year to his 57-acre farm in Mt. Kisco, N.Y.

The Gaekwar of Baroda, gem-collecting Indian ruler of some 3,000,000 souls, arrived in Manhattan with wife & child for an American outing, promptly inquired about the availability of bodyguards (he was familiar with the Lindbergh case, he explained), made it safely to the Waldorf-Astoria under cover of four detectives.

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