After eight months of marriage, Marion Davies, onetime actress and friend of the late William Randolph Hearst, filed suit for divorce from her merchant-mariner husband, Capt. Horace Brown. Two days later, Columnist Hedda Hopper reported “the strangest reconciliation in Hollywood’s history.” Brown’s story to Hedda: “I don’t know why she took me back, because I’m a beast. I bought a monkey as a pet, and the monkey bit her. I pulled the phone out by the roots. I went down to her sister Rose’s house and shot out all the lights in her driveway. I pushed her in the swimming pool. I turned the fire hose on her friends when they came to see her, and when they got inside, I let the air out of their tires. I’m a beast.” Added Marion: “I took him back. I don’t know why. I guess because he’s standing right beside me, crying. Thank God we all have a sense of humor.”
In Los Angeles, Mrs. Edith Kermit Roosevelt Barmine, 24, granddaughter of Teddy Roosevelt, filed suit for divorce from Alexander G. Barmine, ex-Soviet general and diplomat, who turned anti-Communist during the 1937 purge. Her charge: cruelty and nonsupport.
In Moscow, the Boss’s son warmed up with dialectic ballyhoo for Soviet Air Forces Day. Declaring that the Russians had invented the airplane and the helicopter, Lieut. General Vasily Stalin, 30, zoomed further into the wild blue yonder. Said he: “How miserable and colorless are the air shows in the capitalist countries … On the very face of it, the bourgeois airman, who is both a bandit and a businessman, has little in common with what we call an air festival. Our airmen carry life and happiness on their wings . . .”
The Busy Life
After spending a night in a St. Louis jail, Alben William Barkley Truitt, 18-year-old grandson of the Vice President, was released to continue his hitchhiking jaunt from a construction job in Alaska to Paducah, Ky. Police had picked him up on a downtown street carrying a loaded .32-cal. pistol. He had found the pistol, said Truitt, and was merely trying to sell it to buy food. The state refused to prosecute, on the grounds that Missouri law permits peaceful interstate travelers to be armed.
In Hollywood, Cinemactress Zsa Zsa
Gabor struck a delicately balanced pose in imitation of another famous singer and actress: Jane Avril, favorite model of French Artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. Then she left for Paris to play the part of the poster model in a new movie, Moulin Rouge, the life story of Lautrec.
A television commentator in a Philadelphia television studio waited patiently for the appearance of his guest star, Judge Marceline Romany, the Puerto Rican delegate who gave the Republican Convention one of its brightest moments. Too late for the program, the missing star was finally discovered. He had gone by mistake to another station, and had been interviewed by a radio commentator there. Said Romany: “I was a little bit confused . . . I’m awfully sorry, honestly, I’m sorry. I’m not used to this.”
In a Boston theater, as he started the second chorus of The Little White Cloud That Cried, Sob Singer Johnnie Ray discovered that the audience of some 4,000 was crying right along with him. Someone had turned loose some tear gas.
Little Things That Count
In Bethesda Naval Hospital, after an operation for infected sinuses, Senator Joseph McCarthy got an astringent convalescent order from his doctor: rest his voice and “refrain from all political utterances for a period of at least six weeks.”
In Haverford, Pa., just back with the Wimbledon singles championship, 17-year-old Maureen (“Little Mo”) Connolly walked off with her third straight Pennsylvania & Eastern States title after losing only eleven games in the entire tournament. Asked about the reported tiff with her coach, Eleanor (“Teach”) Tennant, she replied: “I am not mad . . . We had a few words in England over my supposedly sore shoulder that never really bothered me, but we kissed and made up. Teach made me what I am today. She changed my entire game, and she’ll be my coach as long as I play tennis.”
In Chicago, Col. Robert McCormick announced that he had received a gift from the Mayor of Cartagena: a stone from the 17th century walls of the Caribbean seaport. The new acquisition brings to 124 the stones he has collected from 48 states, 16 battlefields and 60 other places of “historical significance” and which are now mortared in the fastness of the south wall of the Tribune Tower.
In Albany, Governor Tom Dewey announced that he was air-expressing several hundred smallmouth bass fingerlings to Emperor Boo Dai of Viet Nam, Indo-China. On his journey to the far Pacific last year, the governor explained, he found that the Emperor had never fished for bass, so Dewey had promised to send enough to stock some native streams.
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