People: Elevations

George Bernard Shaw, who seldom goes beyond comparing himself with Shakespeare, received a bigger boost from an unidentified woman visitor to the House of Commons. In the central lobby she suddenly began shouting, “Mr. Bernard Shaw is God’s right-hand man.” She was promptly thrown out.

Governor Thomas E. Dewey was taken for a ride in one of Bell Aircraft’s new helicopters (see cut), wondered if one might ease his commuting problem between Albany and his home in Pawling.

Senator Claude Pepper got a citation from the editors of Baby Talk magazine—for his “vigorous and effective stimulation” (via maternal and child welfare legislation) of national thinking about mothers and babies.

Delations

Ezra Pound, Idaho-born expatriate poet, scholar and cantankerous crackpot, opponent of “the God-damned system that makes one war after another,” arrived in Washington to be tried for treason (pro-Axis broadcasts from Italy). “Does anyone have the faintest idea what I actually said in Rome?” he asked. “Get over the idea that I betrayed anybody.”

Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s ballroom, dining room and one of her bathrooms, from her abandoned brownstone mansion on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, were bought by Paramount Pictures as props.

Adolf Hitler, looking for all the world like a proud papa, turned up in the photograph album of Eva Braun, his stock preferred blonde, whom he supposedly married the day before they died together in burning Berlin. Dozens of family-style snapshots, some of them cosily captioned “And here is Uschi again,” showed Adolf and Eva with a baby girl whose latest picture indicated that she was about three. One picture (see cut) seemed to indicate that Adolf had two little bastards. But the Army said no; it had evidence that the Kinder belonged to Eva’s sister. Fritz Braun, Eva’s father, agreed; he said that he visited Eva once a month and never saw signs of pregnancy.

Body & Soul

Carole Landis, lush, blond cinemactress whose ambition is to graduate from cheese cake pictures to Bette Davis roles, played the outraged woman in an offset drama.

A man broke into her dressing room, announced himself as “Grimmick, the attorney,” started in a businesslike way to unzip her black tights. Her screams brought suave Cinemactor George Sanders, a gatekeeper and a studio policeman. Later, in the Hollywood police station, Carole pointed an indignant finger at smirking Attorney Charles Gramlich, a former mental patient, and undramatically said: “That’s the guy.”

Beatrice Bishop Berle, physician-wife of U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Adolph A. Berle Jr., was made an honorary member of the Rio Society of Medicine and Surgery, in recognition of her efforts to improve public health in Rio.

Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain complained that the mountain air at the fortress of Portalet in the Pyrenees was too cold for an old lifer like him. He was moved to the prison colony on the He d’Yeu, in the Bay of Biscay.

Tyrus Raymond (“Ty”) Cobb, whose ample baseball earnings (top: $70,000 in 1928), judiciously invested in Coca-Cola stock, have made him rich, gave $250,000 to build and endow a hospital in Royston, Ga., his birthplace.

Ellsworth (“Sonny Boy”) Wisecarver, who started making tabloid headlines at 14 when he ran away from home with an unmarried mother of two (TIME, May 15, 1944), did it again at 16—this time with Mrs. Eleanor Deveny, wife of a Japan-based G.I. After the pair were arrested in Oroville, Calif., Mrs. Deveny said: “I would like to take care of Sonny the rest of my life, and not on a motherly basis.” Los Angeles Juvenile Judge A. A. Scott was impressed—”If Ellsworth gets into any more of these jams, he will be the most sought-after man in the U.S.” —but unmoved: he sent Sonny Boy to jail as an incorrigible, booked Mrs. Deveny for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Atomic Angles

Jan Christian Smuts, South Africa’s old-soldier Prime Minister, met U.S. Minister Thomas Holcomb, former U.S.M.C. Commandant, at a reception in Pretoria. “Frisk him all over,” Smuts ordered in his best gangsterese, “I think he has an atomic bomb.”

Charles Lindbergh came out for world organization in the atomic age as the only alternative to “constant fear and eventual chaos.” He still insisted “that World War II could have been avoided.”

Political Pictures

Doris Duke Cromwell, a Rome reporter for I.N.S., stole the show from Premier Ferruccio Parri at his own press conference: while photographers took 20 pictures of her to every one of the Premier, she became so flustered she forgot to take notes on the conference.

James Roosevelt, lately of the Marines, who has kept mum on his postwar plans except to say that he has no political ambitions, took over as head of the Los Angeles County Democratic Committee’s subcommittee on veterans’ affairs.