People: The Busy Life

Billie Burke, who now plays twittery movie matrons, used to be the vivacious, red-haired toast of New York. She earned $1,500 a week, kept a Rolls-Royce for herself and a “nice Packard” for her mother. She lived in a whirl of furs, maids and flowers, and married Follies Producer Florenz Ziegfeld. Last week in Collier’s, Billie reminisced about the great Flo and the gaudy ’20s.

After their 1914 wedding in Hoboken, N.J., Billie discovered that Ziegfeld wore long, silk, peach-colored underwear, which she quickly threw away. But life went on being brightly colored. Ziegfeld liked to tear off to Palm Beach to play roulette. He won or lost $50,000 at a sitting, would say “Go away, dear,” when “I tiptoed in to plead with him in whispers.” He insisted on traveling in private railroad cars, and when their daughter Patty was six, Ziegfeld bought her a 250-lb. elephant (he had already stocked their Hastings-on-Hudson estate with two lion cubs, two bears, six ponies, a herd of deer and several cockatoos). This exotic domesticity was frequently punctuated by Mrs. Ziegfeld’s magnificent tantrums, because Flo could not shake the habit of falling in love with beautiful women.

“I was,” wrote Billie, “destined to be jealous of the entire Follies chorus and star list for the rest of my married life. Once when Flo came in at 5 a.m., after seeing Olive Thomas I suppose, I crept downstairs to find him raiding the icebox. Nearby was an enormous silver soup tureen and ladle. I seized the ladle and belabored him about the head and shoulders.

Flo merely laughed and carried me upstairs in his arms.” On other occasions, Billie screamed, threw china, tore draperies off windows. During these spells, Ziegfeld regarded her quietly and smoked long cigars. “The trouble with you, Billie,” he once said, “is that when you accuse me, you always pick the wrong girl.”

But there was no mistaking his interest in Marilyn Miller, the loveliest Ziegfeld girl of them all. “I would prefer,” wrote Billie, “to think that Flo was merely fascinated by Marilyn Miller, but … he idolized her.

“Marilyn gave out an interview in Boston. She said that he was desperately in love with her and would marry her if I would step aside. ‘She waves her baby at him like George M. Cohan waves the American flag,’ they quoted Marilyn. Now that was a smart line, but I never believed Marilyn thought it up herself.”

After a great deal of angry thought, Billie decided—as she always did during their 18 turbulent years of marriage—that she did not want a divorce. “In spite of everything, I knew that Flo loved me.” She sent for him, and a reconciliation scene followed.

“Flo reached in his pocket and handed me a [diamond] bracelet . . . which must have cost $20,000. I snatched it from him and flung it into a corner. Flo didn’t flick an eye to see where it went, but I did, and Patricia Ziegfeld still wears it on very formal occasions.”

Rex Ingram, Negro actor who played “De Lawd” in the movie version of Green Pastures, was picked up in Manhattan for violation of the Mann Act. The charge: importing a 15-year-old white high-school sophomore from Salina, Kans., for a weekend in New York (Rex had made the plane reservation for her, and she had given the family the slip by telling them that she was going shopping in Topeka). When the 53-year-old actor heard that he might be taken back to Kansas City for trial, he cried: “But I don’t want to go to Kansas City. I’ve got a new show [Charleston, 1822, a Theatre Guild production] that must open on Thursday.” Next day he was out on $2,500 bail, but would not open in the show. A Guild spokesman thought things were “too confused,” and the Guild hired a replacement. Back in Salina, the girl was being packed off to a school for delinquents as she protested: “I’m not sorry. I love Rex.”

The Very Rev. Hewlett (“the Red Dean”) Johnson was almost ready to set off on that delayed lecture tour in the U.S. Turned down when he asked for a visa last August (it was not the Dean the State Department objected to, but his sponsors, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship), the Dean now had new guardian angels: a new, “non-subversive,” specially formed Committee of Welcome.* The State Department was expected to come through with the visa this time.

The Bright Future

Donna Rachele Mussolini, 59-year-old widow of the Duce, was temporarily unhappy in Forio, near Naples, where she was living in a cold-water flat with her two youngest, Anna Maria and Romano. According to Luigi Criscuolo, who publishes a monthly newsletter in Manhattan, she was considering a job-hunting trip to the U.S. (the daughter of a peasant, she worked in the fields and did a brief turn as housemaid before she married Benito). Criscuolo said she was broke; her $40-a-month government pension had been cut off, but once she got to the U.S. things would be dandy: she “would find no difficulty in making a living in this country, since she is a competent farmer.”

Franklin P. Adams, veteran columnist and mnemonic marvel of radio’s Information, Please, was dabbling again in politics.* He was put up as Democratic candidate for justice of the peace in Weston, Conn., a rock-ribbed Republican community.

Shaggy Henry Wallace registered to vote in stylish Westchester County, N.Y. (he gave his occupation as poultry farmer), but forgot to bring along his high-school diploma, and had to take a literacy test. His score: 100%.

The Dim View

Georges (“Gorgeous Georges”) Carpentier, a promising French heavyweight until he tried to mix it with Jack Dempsey in 1921, came back for a visit to the U.S. with some thoughts on middle age (he is 54): “I don’t feel old. I know I’m getting old, but I don’t feel it. I don’t want to see it even. I don’t look in the mirror any more.” He had found that “life is very interesting if you make mistakes. That gives you an ambition in life to correct mistakes, to make money, to lose it, to make it all over again. That keeps you young.”

Germany’s old Paul von Hindenburg had offered some sound deathbed advice to his successor (according to some evidence revealed at a war-crimes trial), but up & coming young Adolf Hitler had ignored the warning “not to trust the Italians, and to keep peace with Britain.”

Fred Allen gloomily considered his next trip to Hollywood: “Once every four years or so someone calls me up and asks me to do a picture. Four years are up and I suppose it’s time . . . They’ve all been bad so far … Let’s face it. I’ve never been any good in pictures, but if [the studio] wants to do it . . .”

The Solid Flesh

In Rome, Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti was feeling tiptop for the first time since he was laid low by a would-be assassin last July 14. He presided at a meeting of the Communist Central Committee, addressed a wildly cheering political meeting of 150,000, and expected to go back to his seat in Parliament any day.

Near Turin, Cinemactor Orson Welles was feeling shaky. He and his new friend, Italian Cinemactress Lea Padovani, were crash-landed in a pasture on their way to a benefit. No bones broken.

In Los Angeles, Carmen Miranda, who in private life is Mrs. David Sebastian, was feeling best of all. The high-strung Brazilian with the high-riding hats announced that she was going to have a baby, her first, some time next May.

*Headed by Harvard’s emeritus Ralph Barton Perry, and including Princeton’s emeritus Christian Gauss, Columbia’s Henry Steele Commager, Henry Seidel Canby, 100-odd others.*In 1944 he campaigned unsuccessfully for state senator (his strategy: “Mostly to keep my trap shut”).