The Subject Is Rose's

Showman Billy Rose throve on paradox. He was a tiny man who loved tall girls, an East Side slum product turned art patron and esthete, a Broadway hipster who became a shrewd Wall Street investor. Though he died six months ago, leaving an estate that may run as high as $50 million, the para oxes are not ended -- Billy Rose has yet to be buried.

Next to George. Getting Billy under ground has been difficult from the ending. It was first hoped that he could be laid to rest amid the $1,000,000 worth of garden sculptures that he presented last year to Israel's Hebrew University. That idea fell through when the Israeli government decided that a museum was no place for the remains of a donor. Next, Billy's sisters, Fiftyish Polly Rose Gottlieb, and Sixtyish Miriam Stern, scouted Westchester Hills Cemetery in Ardsley, N.Y. After driving out with Executor Arthur Cantor, a Broad way pressagent and producer (The Tenth Man), the sisters chose the cemetery's biggest plot, which cost some $48,000 and lay opposite the grave cf Composer George Gershwin. They also planned a monument designed by Sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Cantor's fellow executors, Lawyer Morris Shilensky and Broker Charles Wohlstetter, told Cantor that he had no business accompanying the next of kin to the cemetery. Then, troubled because no price had been agreed upon with Sculptor Noguchi for his design, the executors demanded written notice from the sisters that they would indemnify the executors should the courts rule that the sum spent for burial was more than "a reasonable amount."

Outraged, the Rose sisters asked Manhattan's Surrogate Court either to dismiss the executors or order them to bury the decedent. Surrogate Joseph A. Cox denied both motions, ruling that "it cannot be said that a fiduciary availing himself of a legal remedy is guilty of improper conduct." Added Cox: Burying the dead is the privilege of the next of kin, while it is "the obligation of the executors to pay the reasonable funeral expenses."

Nothing now prevents the sisters from burying Billy. Since Surrogate Cox's decision, the executors have taken the position that the sisters have a free hand to spend a "reasonable" sum on the burial. But the sisters seem preoccupied with their legal battle to break Billy's will, specifically the part that left the bulk of the estate--made up largely of A.T. & T. stock and assorted real estate--to the Billy Rose Foundation, which he set up in 1958 for "nonprofit and exclusively religious, charitable or educational purposes."

Billy's bequests to his sisters generally reflect his former relations with them. Polly is to get $50,000 outright and the income from $1,000,000 worth of tax-free municipal bonds--about $40,000 annually. Miriam gets the income from $100,000 worth of similar bonds--about $4,000 annually. Both sisters contend that Billy was of sound mind in making his bequests to them but was under the malign influence of unnamed persons in leaving most of his estate to the foundation, including the $1,100,000 in municipal bonds that will revert to the foundation when the sisters die.

On the Shelf. Not surprisingly, Billy's non-burial recently made Variety's front page: BILLY ROSE ESTATE HUNG-UP . . . LEGENDS CONTINUE TO FLOWER IN DEATH. In California, Sister Polly responded with an emotional letter to Variety in which she blamed everything on the executors. Columnist Leonard Lyons last week brightly suggested that Billy be buried in the foundations of the 50-story skyscraper that will rise on the former site of his Ziegfeld Theater, the sale of which enriched the estate by $18 million. In Manhattan, Sister Miriam responded with a letter telling Lyons not to be "callous."

Meanwhile, Billy's mortal remains lie in a cold-storage receiving vault at the cemetery. Asked what Billy would make of it all, a Broadway friend said: "He'd be damned mad at first, but then he'd see the irony of it; and when he realized that his name was in the papers, it would be just fine with him."

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