Idle Hours

Taffy-haired Senator Warren ("Maggie") Magnuson, 43, a little late in winding up his vacation, missed the opening of the 81st Congress. At first his office spoke vaguely of "auto trouble." Friends injudiciously added that he had been doing the Seattle nightspots with lush, blonde June Millarde (known professionally in Hollywood pin-up circles as Toni Seven). Heiress to an estimated $3,000,000, Toni is the daughter of Silent Star June Caprice and Director Harry Millarde. While the tabloids were still eating up every new rumor, the Senator appeared in Washington. Had he and Toni been married in the desert? Said he: "Completely absurd." In Hidden Valley, Calif., Toni said: "I feel very bad about the whole thing . . . I love him enough to step out of the picture if publicity would hurt his career."

Before setting off with wife Eleanor Holm on a four-month round-the-world tour, Columnist Billy Rose explained: "My world has been bounded by the flea circus on 42nd Street and the statue up at Columbus Circle, and I figure it can do my perspective nothing but good to take a hinge at how the other 99.9 percent lives."

Lauritz Melchior, off for some big-game hunting in East Africa, hoped that he could find "a live dragon for Siegfried . . . I've killed him so many times that I need a new one."

It was like old times for the oldtimers vacationing on the Riviera. The Duke of Windsor stepped out for a wind-and-rainswept game of golf with his old friend, Belgium's exiled King Leopold (see cut)^; later on, some of the old gang dropped in for dinner at the Windsors. Winston Churchill came with his wife and daughter Sarah; Leopold came with wife Princess de Rethy, son Prince Baudouin and daughter Princess Josephine Charlotte. Rounding out the party: Rumania's ex-King Michael and wife Princess Anne of Bourbon-Parma.

General Douglas MacArthur, 68, admitted that he had taken one day off during 1948 (when he flew over to Korea to take part in the inauguration of the new republic). His firm New Year's resolution: not to do it again in 1949.

Treasured Moments

Princess Wilhelmina, who abdicated last September as Queen of The Netherlands, finally got her pension approved by the Dutch parliament, which decided, despite grumbles from a guilder-minded minority, that 400,000 ($151,000) a year was not too much for an ex-queen who had given 50 years' service.

Bob Mathias, who outran, out-jumped, and out-threw 34 of the world's best last summer to become the youngest (17) Olympic decathlon champion in history, became the youngest to win the James E. Sullivan Memorial Award as 1948's amateur of the year. He also ran a close second to baseball's highly professional Lou Boudreau in the poll for the year's No. 1 male athlete.

Sophie ("Last of the Red-Hot Mamas") Tucker admitted to being a landmark. To the New York Public Library she presented all the personal theatrical scrapbooks of her 43 years of trouping (more than 200 of them, in three trunks and a wicker hamper). They would be filed in the reference rooms as the library's "most comprehensive collection of material on vaudeville and cabaret entertainment."

Serge Koussevitzky was in the middle of his 25th and final year as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In honor of the quarter-century of musical service, Boston's starchiest citizens unbent to give him (and his whole orchestra) a lavish testimonial dinner and full documentary proof of just how much they admire him: a scroll making him the only non-Harvard lifetime honorary member of Boston's fusty Harvard Club.

Troubled Times

Terrible-tempered Sir Thomas Beecham let fly with a broadside at Britain's semi-nationalized Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. Among the trustees, a "hapless set of ignoramuses and nitwits ..." roared the conductor, there was "not a single person who knows anything about opera or has practical experience with it, and whose opinion is worth a brass farthing . . ." Sir John Anderson, chairman of the opera trust, put aside his dignity long enough to retort: "Unfortunately [Sir Thomas'] great gifts are associated with other characteristics, including ... an unbridled tongue." The London News Chronicle put it a bit more bluntly: "All too frequently these days, Sir Thomas ceases to be amusing and becomes an ill-mannered boor."

Handsome Eric Johnston, fast-talking front man for the U.S. movie industry, got his lumps, too. The Moscow weekly, Soviet Art, called Eric an imperialist agent, with the face of a model and the smile of a "toothpaste advertisement."

The British press was just about fed up with Rita Hay worth and her current front-page romance with the opulent Aly Khan. Editorialized The People (circ. 4,500,000): "This is the last time this newspaper will report ... the squalid love affair ... an insult to decent-minded women the world over." Chorused the Sunday Pictorial (circ. 4,000,000), under the headline, A VERY SORDID BUSINESS: "The current behavior ... if described in a film script, would never get by the censors either here or in America. How would YOU describe a friendship in which a divorced woman careens across two continents with a married man--coming to a temporary halt in Switzerland, where his wife was already staying with his children? Or do you find a certain charm in the fact that the motherly Miss Hayworth continues to drag around her four-year-old daughter on this vulgar joyride?"

One man's list of the "worst dressed" people of 1948, prepared by a Hollywood fashion designer named Ray Driscoll, began with Margaret Truman ("so overdressed she resembles a procession"). Almost as bad: Adolphe Menjou ("silent-movie attire . . . out with button shoes"), Princess Elizabeth ("brings back the potato bag silhouette"), Fred Allen ("impressed, unfitted, unfashionable"), Tallulah Bankhead ("mannish wardrobe . . . suggests it was created for a Long Island lumberjack"), Princess Wilhelmina ("like an overdone mantelpiece"), and Lucius' Beebe ("a wax dummy of 1900 in reverse").

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