People: Notions in Motion

Queen Helen, handsome mother of Rumania’s King Mihai, heard that she was to be reimbursed for a personal war loss, suffered when U.S. bombers raided Brasov. En route to her from one of the raiders (Colonel Marshall R. Gray, now in Seattle) was a pair of nylons, to replace those she had torn while making royal tracks out of the city.

Princess Elizabeth of England was unofficially engaged to two foreign princes —according to rumors in each prince’s country. Within eleven days Buckingham Palace denied that she was about to marry either 41-year-old Prince Regent Charles of Belgium, or 24-year-old Prince Philip of Greece.

Gabriel Pascal, British movie producer, went to Egypt to film Caesar and Cleopatra, found the Sphinx unphotogenic, imported a British-made model, left it behind after the shooting—inscribed: “With the compliments of [Cinemagnate] J. Arthur Rank.”

Princess Gladys de Polignac of France’s famed champagne family, Pommery (she married into it; her American mother married Le Petit Parisien’s publisher), arrived in the U.S. on a Red Cross hunt for dental supplies, posed with a cluster of store teeth that was something new in costume jewelry. Item on her shopping list: four million false teeth.

Into the Future

Eleanor Roosevelt’s future suddenly became a matter of speculation. Vassar College listed her name among some 200 submitted as possible successors next year to retiring President Henry Noble MacCracken. New York State’s Republican Committee noted that her column had been “concerning itself more and more” with state and city politics, wondered aloud if she was going to run for Senator. From Hyde Park came a reminder that she had often sworn she would never run for public office. On the Vassar matter she made no comment.

Frances Perkins signed up for a temporary teaching job: two months of “management training” at Radcliffe College next winter.

Judy Garland, back in Hollywood after a long honeymoon, shared a secret with the world: she is going to have a baby next spring.

Out of the Past

Pastor Martin Niemöller, still weak from seven years of concentration-camp life, renewed an old fight (begun in 1934), to exclude Nazi-collaborating clergymen from the church, suffered two heart attacks at the German Protestant conference at Treysa.

Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, bringing back memories of baseball’s better days, battled it out at Manhattan’s Polo Grounds. The plump Sultan of Swat masterminded his Eastern team to victory over the plump Nonpareil’s Westerners in Esquire’s annual Ail-American Boys’ Game.

Gracie Hall Roosevelt, Eleanor’s late brother, who once proved—to his own satisfaction—that a man could eat on $1.75 a week, left a $278,264 estate but owed more than $37,000 of it. A tax appraisal showed that his Manhattan creditors included the Hotel St. Regis ($101), Monte Carlo nightclub ($46), suburban Arrowhead Inn ($347).

Playing It Safe

Risë Stevens, Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano now slumming in Hollywood (Going My Way, Time to Love), had her voice insured for $1 million by Lloyd’s. Premium: $10,000 a year.

Max Schmeling, who had been seized with an idea for “re-educating the youth of Germany,” was told by the British Control Commission to save his strength.

The onetime fighter and wartime Nazi propaganda stooge has an interest in a book-publishing firm; the commission refused the firm a publishing license.

Mme. Suzy, veteran Parisian milliner, brought her first batch of Paris hats to Manhattan since 1941, kept them temporarily under wraps, but did her best to describe them for reporters: “Hats, just hats . . . not large or heavy, but, on the other hand, not small. . . .”

Matters of Moment

The Rt. Hon. Alfred Duff Cooper, impeccable British Ambassador to France, gave a peccant Riviera innkeeper a nice demonstration of the retort diplomatic. The Ambassador, his Lady, and a motoring party of six friends lunched at the inn, got a bill for 16,000 francs (about $320). The Ambassador wrote his name on the bill, tucked it in an envelope addressed to the regional authority on price control, and called the headwaiter. “Would you be so kind as to send this,” he murmured, arose, and departed.

Mohandas K. Gandhi introduced a new marital oath at the wedding of two friends, urged it on all his followers: no begetting of offspring till India wins freedom.

Colonel James Stewart got a movie star’s welcome in Manhattan when he returned from two years’ Air Forces service overseas. At 37, he still looked boyish, but his hair was greying. “I don’t care what color it gets,” he said, “as long as it stays in.” He planned to go right back to cinemacting—in “anything except a war picture.” Asked whether he preferred British or American girls, Jimmy looked pained. Said he: “I don’t consider myself qualified to say.”

Raymond B. Fosdick, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, issued a hurry-up appeal to the world to unite for self-protection against the atomic bomb. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, he observed that “brotherhood … has suddenly become a condition of survival,” guessed that if the late Wendell Willkie were titling his best-seller today he would make it: One World or NONE.