People: People, Jan. 7, 1946

Old Wine, New Bottles

George Bernard Shaw, Irish advocate of a phonetic English alphabet (see EDUCATION), decided to give Eire his early manuscripts. Dublin had asked for them, and “as an Irishman I regarded that request in the nature of a command.” It was no Christmas present, said he, for “I don’t have anything to do with Christmas. I’m a civilized human being.”

Mrs. Stanley Mortimer Jr. and her clothes did it again—won the Best-Dressed Woman title for the second year running. Donors of the title: Manhattan’s dressmakers, who sent some 150 hand-picked voters a list of past winners (“merely to refresh your mind”) with the grave warning that the affair was “one which we try to conduct seriously.”

Mrs. Mortimer, sister of Mrs. Vincent Astor and Mrs. John Hay Whitney (ex-Mrs. Jimmy Roosevelt), again nosed out Mrs. Byron Foy, who sat firmly in second place, followed by Mrs. Millicent Rogers. Notable absence: Mrs. William Rhinelander Stewart, last year’s third. Notable presence: Valentina, dress designer. The rest of the top ten, all past placers: Mrs. Lawrence Tibbett, the Duchess of Windsor, Louise Macy Hopkins (whose husband Harry is chairman of Manhattan’s garment industry), Cinemactress Rosalind Russell, Mrs. Robert Sarnoff, Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce.

James Thurber, world-weary artist-humorist (My World—and Welcome to It, My Life and Hard Times), was admitted to the dusty, plushy National Institute of Arts and Letters.* Also elevated: versifying Information Pleaser Franklin Pierce Adams, meticulous Poet Wallace Stevens (Harmonium), rumpled, ever-ready Poet Robert P. Tristram Coffin (Maine Ballads), left-winging Dramatist Lillian Hellman (Watch on the Rhine), New York Times Columnist Simeon Strunsky (Topics of The Times).

Christian Gauss, 67, noted Princeton nourisher of literary talent (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, Edmund Wilson’s), 20-year Dean of the College till his retirement last October, was redecanized. His new post, honorary and created especially for him: Dean of Alumni.

Poor Relations

Tommy Manville, 51, white-haired Peter Pan who has married seven Wendys, and three weeks ago went through the legal farce with Wife No. 8 (Georgina Campbell), was still flying in & out of temperamental windows. A patrolman’s routine written report at the Mamaroneck, N.Y. station house: “At 7:32 p.m. I was detailed to Mr. Manville’s residence. Mr. & Mrs. Manville were having a family argument and Mr. Manville requested that I stand by for awhile. On detail to 9:35 p.m.”

Trinidad Perez Franco was routed out of comfortable obscurity by Rio newsmen, who tried to make her talk about her famed brother Francisco in Spain, got a discreet reply: “I have not seen Francisco since 1912.” But Franco’s middle-aged expatriate sister, who runs a suburban fruit store for fun (“I like the colors”), was more colorfully quoted by neighbors: “To hell with Francisco. . . . He was always a little effeminate.”

In & Out

Fiorello LaGuardia jounced out of the New York Mayor’s office with all the noise, gaiety, and earnest passion he had employed for twelve years. He read ” ‘Twas the night before Christmas” against a musical background of Jingle Bells, received a scroll from some Boy Scouts, dispatched a doll to a little girl in England, bussed an “emancipated woman” who had worn trousers in 1918. Ahead, besides radio broadcasting and column-writing:*1) a foreign junket at last, as temporary ambassador to attend Brazil’s presidential inauguration; 2) an autobiography, which he planned to write “as the inspiration moves me” and hoped to finish in time “for the Christmas, 1947, trade.”

Cab Galloway, high-styled Negro jump-leader, got into law trouble again. Picked up last fall after a Manhattan poking match with another bandleader (who later withdrew his charges), the Man with the Ho-De-Ho butted his head painfully against the color line in Kansas City, where he tried to enter all-white Pla-Mor Ballroom. He said that Negro Bandleader Lionel Hampton had asked him over. A guard (who said Cab had pushed him) beat him over the head with a gun, sent him to a hospital. He was 1) bandaged up, 2) charged with drunkenness, resisting arrest, and creating a disturbance. Court verdict: acquittal.

Ezra Pound, his trial for treason postponed by his lodgment in a Washington mental institution, appeared to be in for a long stay. At St. Elizabeth’s Hospital a psychiatrist judged the poet’s chances for complete recovery “pretty slim,” submitted a definition of him in psychiatry’s own peculiar poetry: “a psychopathic personality who has developed paranoid psychoses with a manic coloring; the psychoses have a grandiose trend—it’s his job to save the Constitution.”

Generalizations

General George C. Marshall, new U.S. envoy newly in China, looked a little worn in a gay-looking news picture taken with Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kaishek. Holiday incidentals to his diplomatic initiation: a luncheon with the Chiangs, a dinner party given by the U.S. chargé d’affaires, an eggnog party given by the commander of U.S. forces in Chungking, a cocktail party given by the Chinese Foreign Minister.

General Evangeline Booth, retired world commander of the Salvation Army and daughter of its founder, reached 80 in Hartsdale, N.Y., got set for yet another energetic spell of stump-speaking—this time in California. “I don’t feel any shortage in agility,” she observed, “and my mind is just as good as it ever was—some people say it’s better.”

General George S. Patron’s rhymed thoughts on a soldier-friend’s death in battle came to light five days after he died, 27 years after he wrote them:

Yet should some future war exact

Of me the final debt

My fondest wish would be to tread

The Path which he has set. . . .

Death found in him no faltering

But faithful to the last

He smiled in the face of Fate

And mocked him as he passed.

No, death to him was not defeat

But victory sublime;

The grave prompted him to be

A hero for all time.

*Whose inner sanctum, the American Academy, Sinclair Lewis once declared “represents only Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.”

*Thirty Newspaper Guild members demanded that before he is allowed to start his column, La-Guardia apologize “to the press as a whole and to the individual members of the press whom he has attacked and insulted.” Said he: “It’s all right with me.”