Monday, Mar. 26, 1956
Married. Niven Busch, 52, novelist (Duel in the Sun) and screenwriter (In Old Chicago, The Westerner); and Carmencita Baker, 28, West Coast socialite; he for the fourth time (his third: Cinemactress Teresa Wright), she for the first; in San Francisco.
Divorced. By Sir Pratapsinghrao, 47, one of the world's richest men (estimated yearly income: $8,000,000), who, as India's Gaekwar ("Keeper of the Cattle") of Baroda (1939-51), ruled a princedom of 8,000 sq. mi. with some 3,000,000 subjects: his second maharani, cigar-smoking Sita Devi, 41; after 13 years of marriage, one child (Prince Sayajirao); in Bombay.
Died. Lieut, (j.g.) David Greig ("Skippy") Browning Jr., 24, star of the 1952 Olympics as the U.S.'s dazzling three-meter diving champion, national collegiate one-and three-meter diving champ (1951-52); in the crash of a North American FJ-3 Fury jet fighter while on a training flight; near Rantoul, Kans.
Died. Prince Ernst Ruediger von Starhemberg, 56, pioneer Fascist, Vice Chancellor of Austria in the pre-World War II Dollfuss and Schuschnigg dictatorships, which he helped set up, organizer of the green-shirted Heimwehr, which wiped out Austria's one solid block of resistance against Naziism in a raid on the Socialist Party in Vienna in 1934; of a heart attack; in Schruns, Austria. Scion of an ancient Austrian family, Von Starhemberg backed the wrong Fascist, worked with Mussolini against the Anschluss, fled when Hitler took over in 1938, saw his 13 castles, hundreds of dwellings, mines, vineyards, 21,000 acres of land confiscated by the Nazis. He popped up in the Free French forces in 1940, spent most of the war in South America with his family. In 1953 charges of high treason against him were dropped by Austrian courts, and his castles and estates were returned to him by sentimental countrymen.
Died. Irene Joliot-Curie, 58, famed fellow-traveling French physicist, elder daughter of the late great discoverers of radium, Marie and Pierre Curie, winner (with her husband, Jean Frederic Joliot-Curie) of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1935) for their discovery of artificial radioactivity; of leukemia, from handling radioactive materials; in the Curie Hospital, Paris.
Died. Louis Bromfield, 59, famed, Ohio-born Pulitzer-prizewinning novelist (for Early Autumn in 1926), jack-of-all-literary-trades, and politically conservative agrarian reformer (Malabar Farm); of complications following a jaundice virus infection; in Columbus, Ohio.
Died. Fred Allen (real name: John Florence Sullivan), 61, radio and TV humorist whose topical, misanthropic wit and acidity reached its peak in the early '40s on the radio show Town Hall Tonight, which included his wife Portland Hoffa and such zany denizens of Allen's Alley as Titus Moody, Mrs. Nussbaum, Senator Claghorn and Ajax Cassidy; of a heart attack while walking his dog near midnight on Manhattan's West 57th Street. Born in Cambridge, Mass., Allen lurched onto the vaudeville boards at 17 as one of the most inept jugglers in history, became a comic after serving in World War I, starred in Broadway musicals through the '203. His radio career was highlighted by a longtime "feud" with Jack Benny and his life illumined with mordant comment on the American scene. Allen on Hollywood: "California is a wonderful place to live--if you're an orange"; on broadcasting: "The scales have not been invented fine enough to weigh the grain of sincerity in radio"; on studio audiences: "When I look at them, I think there must be a slow leak in Iowa."
Died. Boleslaw Bierut, 63, first secretary of the United Polish Workers' (Communist) Party, longtime slippery provocateur who was picked by the Russians to head the Moscow-sponsored Polish (Lublin) government during World War II and was muscled in as head of state two days after the Red army "liberated" Warsaw; of a heart attack; in Moscow, where he was stricken after attending last month's 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party.
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