New Directions

New York City's Mayor William O'Dwyer, 59, running for reelection, was a likely candidate for marriage as well. Photographers snapped him at St. Patrick's Cathedral and the ballet with brunette, thirtyish ex-Model Sloan Simpson, a fashion consultant whom he met about a year ago. Newsmen scraped together hints that suggested a wedding by Christmas. It would be the second for each.* The most piquant hint came from the mayor himself. Asked pointblank for his intentions, O'Dwyer parried: "I will discuss that after the election." Then he leaned back in his chair and whistled a few bars of Some Enchanted Evening.

At Lake Success, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinslcy found something that Russians and Americans have in common. Switching briefly from his own language to English to make a quotation, he told a U.N. committee: "I trust you will excuse my barbarous English, but it is well known that English pronunciation often cannot be mastered, not only by Russians, but also by the Americans."

In Hollywood, where actresses traditionally shun fleshy publicity poses once they become stars, pressagents gingerly asked 42-year-old Barbara Stanwyck to get into a bathing suit for some photographs. Barbara beamed: "I've been perfectly willing to pose for cheesecake art, but nobody ever asked me."

Prince Igor Troubetskoy, husband of ailing Millionairess Barbara button, announced that he would be a contestant in the Indianapolis 500-mile auto race next Memorial Day. Did Barbara approve? "Of course not," said the prince, "but she respects the freedom of the individual."

Actor-Manager Maurice Evans, specialist since 1935 in such classic doublet & hose roles as Romeo, Hamlet, Richard II, Falstaff and Macbeth, broke a theatrical tradition. For The Browning Version (see THEATER), he made his first Broadway appearance in what he called "an honest-to-God pair of pants."

Inside Sources

The literary world shook with a double-barreled report: 1) Ernest Hemingway's first book since For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) would be out in March, and 2) Hemingway had been close to death last February when he started writing it. As his publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons, told the story: Hemingway suffered blood poisoning in February from a fragment of shotgun wadding that lodged in his eye while he was shooting wild fowl in Italy. Doctors gave him a short time to live. Feeling that he could not finish the novel "of large proportions" that he had been working on for years, he started writing a new one, went right on with it after throwing off his illness. The 300-page book's subject: World War II. Its title: still unchosen.

The international smart set's Lady Mendl, eightyish, tempted the palates of Vogue readers with her own recipes for some dishes that mother never even thought of making, e.g., Kidneys Ali-Bab ("brown one pound of veal kidneys . . . set aflame with a glass of brandy . . .")

Hitler's financial Merlin, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, who was acquitted of war crimes in Niirnberg, was back at the old stand with a sure cure for Germany's ailing finances. In a new book, Schacht called for a return to the gold standard and a billion-dollar U.S. gold loan to Germany to back the mark.

Globe-trotting Radio Commentator Lowell Thomas flew back home from Asia 15 Ibs. lighter than he went in. Though on crutches with the thigh fracture he suffered when thrown in Tibet by a half-wild pony, he could reminisce about his native diet of yak butter and yak meat cooked over fires of yak dung; his recorded broadcast from the forbidden Tibetan capital (carried to India by yak), and his gifts to Tibet's 15-year-old Dalai Lama (a gold & silver Siamese tiger skull, an alarm clock, a raincoat).

At a Washington luncheon given for him by veterans' groups, Presidential Aide Major General Harry H. Vaughan seemed fully recovered from the Senate's five-percenter inquiry. Boomed Vaughan: "The only two people I have to please are Mr. Truman and Mrs. Vaughan . . . I am considered in many circles to be unethical and I am sure I will continue to be, but I am going to continue to be the way I have been."

For the New York Times Book Review, Pianist Artur Rubinstein wrote a tart review of French Novelist Andre Gide's Notes on Chopin. Sample Rubinstein pan: "... a long and pretentious music lesson, apparently written by a frustrated and embittered amateur pianist who has tried in vain to dominate the difficult keyboard for the last sixty years."

Italian Cinemaestro Roberto Rossellini announced that he would get to work soon on a film portraying the life of St. Francis of Assisi (to be shot, of course, in the mountain town of Assisi). He will get artistic advice, but no performance, from his great & good friend, Ingrid (Joan of Arc) Bergman.

Red Faces

Novelist John P. Marquand lost a legal fight to buy out the interests of six cousins in a 46-acre ancestral estate (scene of his Wickford Point) in Newburyport, Mass. Marquand, who had argued that he could not live in peace with relatives setting up summer homes all over the place, was left with two houses and only 15 acres.

Gloria Swanson, fiftyish, oldtime movie femme fatale now trying a Hollywood comeback, learned that the will of her fifth husband, Broker William M. Davey, "intentionally refrained" from leaving anything of his $300,000 estate to her.

In Baltimore, reformed Stripteaser Margie Hart, starring in the legitimate theater with a role in Light Up the Sky, backslid into burlesque when her black velvet pajamas split during the third act.

Greta Garbo, who has ducked behind floppy hats, napkins and even her own hair to keep out of newscamera lenses, was bested by vigilant photographers on a Manhattan dock as she arrived from France (see cut).

Just Deserts

Soprano Margaret Truman, bedizened with full stage makeup, opened Atlanta's concert season by packing every one of the Municipal Auditorium's 5,000 seats, plus 100 chairs placed in the orchestra pit for the overflow.

Into the White House went Swiss-born Sculptor Ernest Durig's bust of a smiling

Harry S. Truman, complete with removable gold-rimmed spectacles.

Fifty U.S. Army musicians invaded Columbia University's campus to play Happy Birthday under the window of its president, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as he reached 59.

Michigan's 65-year-old Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg looked cheerful about taking his medicine (90 days of strict rest at home) along with some good news from his doctors: the operation that removed half his left lung had been "a complete success" and he was in "excellent" condition.

The work of the U.N. General Assembly's Social Committee halted for several minutes while members joined in an ovation for the 65th birthday of their colleague, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. Wrote she, summing up her day: "Everyone was as kind and thoughtful as it is possible to an old lady who still feels remarkably young -- at times, at least."

* O'Dwyer's first wife died in 1946. Miss Simpson was divorced in 1942 from Carroll Dewey Hipp of Teaneck, N.J. Though she and the mayor are both Roman Catholics, her divorce would not bar a church wedding. The church does not recognize her civil marriage to Hipp.

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