Family Affairs

After 21 months of marriage (her second, his sixth), brunette Novelist Kathleen (Forever Amber) Winsor told the judge about life with her clarinet-tooting husband, Artie Shaw. In the tabloids, it all sounded like a souped-up version of her own Restoration fiction, in modern dress. In 31 pages of searing affidavit, Kathleen swore that Artie had screamed at her, beaten her, come home "drunken, abusive, and belligerent." He had also tried out on her his favorite theory of domestic relations ("The only way to keep a woman in line--be a caveman"). "He boasted of having thrown Lana Turner [Mrs. Shaw No. 3] down a flight of stairs, and said that it improved their marriage considerably. He told me that he had kicked Ava Gardner [Mrs. Shaw No. 5] several times and that she had 'responded nobly.' " Kathleen's lot: "He knocked me down" in the Norwalk, Conn. railroad station, and once "threatened to kill me." Still another time "he referred to me as a materialistic and vindictive bitch."

Kathleen asked for an annulment, an accounting of $116,327 which she said was her share of a joint bank account, $500 weekly alimony, $10,000 counsel fees. Artie answered right back with 28 pages of tart countersuit. Kathleen, he charged, had refused to bear children ("Children have always enslaved women") and had even suggested an operation which, as the N.Y. Daily News gleefully phrased it, would have made him "forever sterile." Artie, who is quoted by Kathleen's lawyer as stating that "any woman who has enough money and still expects her husband to support her is nothing but a high-class prostitute," also went into the financial side of his marriage: "She is trying to blackmail me. I know the defendant to be a money-mad extortioner." And anyway, he added, neither of their Mexican divorces was legal, and so he figures that he is still the lawful wedded husband of Ava.

Merle Oberon, who used to be Lady (Alexander) Korda, announced that after three years she and second husband Lucien Ballard were all washed up. He was her cameraman, too.

The Working Class

The Chicago Tribune's Colonel Robert R. McCormick came back from his flying tour of Europe feeling, in some ways, better. "I think America is four times as important as I thought before I left," said he. "It is ten times as important as the average man thinks, and 100 times as important as the average New Yorker thinks." As for Laborite England, said he, "an international crowd of social climbers have control."

As for McCormick, Britain's Beverley Baxter, M.P., drama critic (the Evening Standard) and ex-managing editor (the London Daily Express), observed: "As a journalist, I salute him . . . As a Britisher, I would not weep if he got caught up in his own presses and added a fifth color to his cartoons."

Camellia, redheaded, golden-skinned cinema favorite of Egypt, arrived in Manhattan on a spur-of-the-moment visit ("Some of my friends were coming," said she, "so I came"), fell into the swing of things almost immediately. Her new-found devoted friend: Lana Turner's former John Alden Talbot. Ripe-mouthed Camellia--born Lillian Cohen, half Egyptian, half French--explained her stardom: "It's the color of my hair, and because I'm thin; all other Egyptian stars are fat and ugly."

Chin-whiskered Statistician Roger W. Babson, oracular wonder of the '20s (he predicted the depression) and Prohibition candidate for President in 1940, prepared to tackle a problem worthy of his years (73). Though he had once plugged Eureka, Kans. as the place to settle and avoid The Bomb, he picked tiny New Boston, N.H. for his new enterprise, bought property there for a laboratory. His project: to break the law of gravity. He had been interested in gravity, he explained, ever since the time, as a boy, he had recited Darius Green and His Flying Machine and been laughed at. "Every division of industry," instructed Babson, "and life itself, from going upstairs to flying, is handicapped by gravity."

Plus & Minus

In Stanford, Calif., Herbert Hoover got a pre-74th-birthday present: $72,000 worth of contributions to the Hoover Library on War, Revolution and Peace. Then he was off to his birthplace, West Branch, Iowa, for the real birthday, where the whole community whooped it up with a parade and a fried-chicken picnic.

Romancer Konrad Bercovici, bestseller of the '20s and authority on gypsies (Ghitza), suffered a gypping. Fresh off a plane home from Paris, he handed an inspector a $50 bill to pay duty at customs. Then he tried another. Both bills were counterfeit. Bercovici explained that he must have asked the wrong person in Paris to change a $100 bill; secret servicemen spotted the bum 50s as made from a plate already seized in Marseille by U.S. agents and French police.*

Irwin Shaw ran second in a contest, but he was still doing all right. His forthcoming first novel, The Young Lions, was described by Producer Leland Hayward (who is also Shaw's agent) as "the greatest American novel and the greatest war story of all time with the possible exception of War and Peace."

*For other news of counterfeit currency, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS.

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