The Press: One & One

According to towheaded young (20) Sharman Douglas, she had flown home from London, where her father is U.S. ambassador, for a look at the old country. As the handsome young (29) Marquess of Milford Haven put it, he was in the U.S. to sell some electric heaters. Both declared it a mere coincidence that they both happened to be in Manhattan at the same time. But Manhattan’s gossip columnists didn’t agree. After all, hadn’t Sharman and David gone dancing together in London? The columnists put one & one together and what they added up to was a pain in Sharman’s pretty neck.

Charles Ventura of the New York World-Telegram archly wrote that Sharman and David would meet in “Suite 39C in the Waldorf-Astoria, chaperoned by a hundred or so other guests at a cocktail party.” Next day, the New York Daily News’s Society Columnist “Nancy Randolph” (Julia McCarthy) excitedly reported “near panic” on Park Avenue: Milford Haven had booked passage for home. (It was all a mistake, explained Nancy; just an old reservation he’d forgotten to cancel.)

The New York Journal-American’s “Cholly Knickerbocker” (Igor Loiewski-Cassini) flashed that Sharman and David were just two angles of a “fascinating triangle.” The third angle: Actress Peggy Maley, who had been dated by David and was clearly “not the type to moan and shyly retire to the background.” Cassini predicted a “tooth & nail fight,” and courteously gave David warning: “. . . be mighty careful . . . Peggy’s father is … the champion pistol shot of the Atlantic City police department.”

In El Morocco, a photographer browbeat David and Sharman into a picture. Then the New York Post’s “Saloon Editor” Earl Wilson happened along: “They were enjoying much too much privacy sitting there along about 11:30, so I busted over.” He asked: “I guess it must be irksome having people horning in on your dates, isn’t it?” Replied Sharman evenly: “Yes, it is.”

Not to be outdone, Columnist Cassini showed somewhat the same kind of enterprise that had gotten him tarred and feathered before (TIME, July 3, 1939). “As the hands of the clock approached 1 a.m.,” he reported in the Journal-American, “the Marquess took Sharman home … I followed the young couple with my car, hoping that David and Sharman might tell me the story of their young love. I also was interested to see whether Peggy Maley and her father . . . might be following . . . Sharman gave David a nice little good-night kiss . . .”

With what passes for disarming candor, Columnist Wilson quoted a comment from an El Morocco patron: “I think [you] newspaper guys ought to have [your] derrières kicked.”

When ex-Major General Bennett E. Meyers was sentenced to jail on a perjury charge (TIME, March 22), his wife quietly took a job to support herself and their children.* Last week, over a Cholly Knickerbocker byline, the New York Journal-American blared: MRS. MEYERS Now A MODEL. Hounded by reporters and photographers, Mrs. Meyers quit the Manhattan fur shop where she had been working under an assumed name.

* U.S. income tax levies and damage suits have tied up all the Meyers’ money.