Milestones, Jan. 7, 1946

Married. Mary Astor (born Lucille Langhanke), 39, longtime cinema siren; and Thomas Wheelock, 41, Chicago broker, lately an A.A.F. meteorologist; she for the fourth time, he for the third; in Hollywood.

Married. Georges Bidault, 46, middle-of-the-road French Foreign Minister, wartime Resistance leader; and Suzanne Borel, 41, his assistant at the Quai d’Orsay and earlier in the underground (where he was known as “Vieu,” she as “Suzy”); both for the first time; in Paris.

Married. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, 52, learned, clear-thinking Foreign Affairs editor, behind-the-scenes adviser on U.S. foreign policy; and Carman Barnes, 32, author, whose sexy, best-selling first novel (Schoolgirl) at 16 brought her fame, fortune and raised a good many eyebrows; she for the first time, he for the second; in Manhattan.

Married. Commander George Howard Earle, 55, former New Dealing Governor of Pennsylvania, later disputatious Minister to Bulgaria (in 1941 a Nazi in Sofia complained that Earle conked him with a champagne bottle), wartime naval attaché in Turkey; and Jacqueline Marthe Jermine Sacre, 23, Paris-born daughter of a Belgian railroad executive in Turkey; he for the second time (four sons by a previous marriage), she for the first; in Istanbul. Said he: “I came back because I adore Jacqueline.” Said she: “I love George. I knew he would come back.”

Died. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Keyes (Roger John Brownlow Keyes), 73, doughty, fire-&-ice British naval hero of the famed World War I raids on Zeebrugge and Ostend, organizer of World War II’s “butcher-and-bolt” Commandos (his son, Lieut. Colonel Geoffrey Keyes, was killed in a Commando raid on Rommel’s African HQ); of cardiac asthma; at his estate in Buckingham.

Died. Theodore Dreiser, 74, pachydermatous, persistent, humorless novelist; of a heart attack; in Hollywood, shortly after completing two novels, his first in over 20 years. A titan rather than a genius, Dreiser in his amoral, sardonic first novel (Sister Carrie, 1900) ended a genteel U.S. literary tradition, cleared the way for a brutal naturalism. His greatest and best-known work, An American Tragedy, a rough-hewn milestone in U.S. letters, emphasized society’s responsibility for the acts of its members.

Died. Robert Frederick Foster, 92, Scottish-born ultimate authority on parlor Cames (Foster’s Hoyle), who specialized in bridge, also knew all about poker, chess, cinch, dice, hearts, whist, skat, Russian bank (his favorite), dominoes; in Eastham, Mass.