Milestones, Sep. 4, 1939

Married. Leverett Saltonstall Jr., 22 Harvard graduate, eldest of Massachusetts Governor Leverett Saltonstall’s five children (three boys, two girls); and Nancy Smith, 21, Groton, Mass, socialite; in Groton.

Married. John William Maxwell Ait ken, 29, fast-flying elder son of Britain’s No. 1 newspaper publisher, Lord Beaverbrook (London Daily Express)* himself publisher of the Sunday Express; anc Cynthia Monteith; in London. An officer in the auxiliary air force, Aitken left ; few hours after the wedding to join hi newly mobilized unit.

Married. Alexander Feodorovich Kerensky, 58, Premier of Russia’s 1917 post-Tsar second provisional government, longtime exile; and Lydia Tritton, 33, daughter of an Australian industrialist; both for the second time; in Martins Creek, Pa.

Divorced. Judith Anderson (real name, Frances Margaret Anderson), 41, Australian-born Broadway actress (Strange Interlude, Family Portrait), from Benjamin Harrison Lehman, University of California English professor and minor novelist (best-known work: Wild Marriage); in Carson City, Nev. Grounds: mental cruelty.

Died. Sidney Coe Howard, 48, topflight U. S. playwright (The Silver Cord, Alien Corn, Yellow Jack), cinemadapter (Bull Dog Drummond, Arrowsmith, Dodsworth), son-in-law of Conductor Walter Damrosch; when a tractor he was cranking lurched forward, pinned and crushed him against a garage wall; on his 700-acre farm near Tyringham, Mass. Born in Oakland, Calif, (where three brothers still live), Sidney Howard used to say that he “grew up in a mess of books . . . fumbled around for some kind of artistic expression.” His fumbling took him to the University of California (where he wrote plays), to George Pierce Baker’s 47 Workshop at Harvard (where he studied how to write them), to the New Republic, to Hearst’s International, to the old Life. In 1925 his first Broadway success, They Knew What They Wanted, won him the Pulitzer Prize. Versatile, systematic, a prodigious worker (he sometimes kept three jobs going at once), he spent some of his time in Hollywood (which he hated), most of it around the New York theatre. This fall he was to have put on his first play under the banner of Manhattan’s new, highly successful Playwrights company, was working on an adaptation of Van Doren’s biography of Benjamin Franklin the morning he was killed. That morning also, Father-in-law Damrosch got word that Martin Wolfe, another daughter’s divorced husband, had died from a fall July 30 while mountain climbing in Tibet.

*Last week stranded unhappily in Canada.