People: Private Lives

Bing Crosby, who long ago involved himself in so many enterprises that he incorporated himself, suddenly announced that he was knocking off work for the rest of 1945. He would spend a week or two in a hospital for treatment of an unspecified infection, he said, and then run for his ranch in Nevada.

Governor Phil M. Donnelly of Missouri beefed that baritone choruses from cattle cars on a railroad siding near the governor’s mansion cost him sleep “about twice a week.”

Bernarr Macfadden, in the latest episode of his 15-year on-again off-again divorce-and-separation battle, was labeled “eccentric” in a Miami court by Wife Mary, who said that he once ordered her to do 200 deep knee bends or forfeit his love. She did the bends, but it was not enough. Introduced in evidence was an old picture of the body-building publisher standing on his head. “He probably would still be standing on his head except for me,” said Mrs. Macfadden. “I put him on his feet.”

Martha Raye was ordered by a Detroit judge to show cause why she should not be cited for contempt of court—for failing to testify in a divorce suit in which a Detroiter’s wife charged that her husband associated with a “Miss X” of Hollywood. Snapped the judge: “Martha Raye doesn’t mean any more to this court than Joe Zilch.”

Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Indian summering at Newport, missed some excitement in her Fifth Avenue Manhattan mansion. A fire started in a bedroom wall plug, ran along a baseboard, up the draperies of a dressing table, ruined a rug and a few fine feathers. Cornelius Jr. sounded the alarm.

Theodore G. (“The Man”) Bilbo got on the mark for another senatorial filibuster (30 days if necessary), visualized himself as the savior of $250 million in public funds by killing a freight-rate bill. A succeeding vision: a bigger & better Capitol to be built with the $250 million. He was “ashamed,” he said, of the present “old, dilapidated, dirty Capitol,” insisted that Cuba’s was better and that the county courthouse back home in Mississippi had Washington’s beat for comfort and convenience.

Al Jennings, onetime “redheaded terror of the Southwest,” now 82-year-old proprietor of a one-acre chicken ranch, went to court in Los Angeles to sue for defamation of character ($100,000 worth). On the Lone Ranger radio program, he had not only been pictured as a common burglar and been suggested as responsible for turning a boy into a criminal, he complained, but “they had this Lone Ranger shootin’ a gun out of my hand—and me an expert!” The onetime cattle-rustler, train-robber, killer (some dozen men by his own count), jailbird† (pardoned by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907), held the jury spellbound with tales of his early crimes, but earnestly denied that he had ever robbed a bank. “I don’t know anything about burglary,” he insisted.

Youngsters

Shirley Temple, out of school, grown up, and married at 17, was about to go into print — with an autobiography titled My Young Life.

Ernest Cadman Colwell, President of the University of Chicago, personally greeted one new student: his son, Carter Colwell, just 13.

Captain Owen D. Johnson, 27, won the Distinguished Service Cross and, following in family footsteps, became a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. He got the French decoration for underground-organizing; his father, Fictioneer (Stover at Yale) Owen Johnson, was similarly honored for World War I propagandizing; Grandfather Robert Underwood Johnson, onetime Ambassador to Italy, was made a Chevalier for easing international copyright restrictions.

Nunnally Johnson, veteran magazine and cinema writer, explained the art of scenario-writing: “You write every line as though it were a ten-word telegram.”*

Vaslav Nijinslcy, 55, ballet idol of a generation ago, not fully recovered from the madness that kept him in a Swiss asylum for years, was the subject of a heartless exploitation. Impresario Sol Hurok announced that he had invited Nijinsky to appear at the Metropolitan Opera House next month, won his consent, and hoped he would dance Petrouchka, a role Nijinsky created in 1911.

Lieut. Colonel James P. S. Devereux, commander of marines on Wake Island when the Japs invaded, arrived home at last after long imprisonment, played ball with Son Patrick (see cut) before receiving the Navy Cross. The citation (signed by the late Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and called by Under Secretary Artemus L. Gates “the shortest and finest one I have read”): “For distinguished and heroic conduct in the line of his profession in the defense of Wake Island, Dec. 7 to 22, 1941.”

† He knew O. Henry at the Ohio Penitentiary, claimed to be the original “Cisco Kid.”

* In other words: WRITE AS THOUGH EVERY LINE WERE A TEN-WORD TELEGRAM