People: People, Mar. 29, 1943

Fine Feathers

England’s well-groomed Board of Trade President Hugh Dalton, who had sworn not to buy a new suit for the duration, urged his fellow Britons to go collarless, tieless, sockless through the summer, said he himself would not hesitate to attend the House of Commons with a naked neck. “Men are a great problem” he decided. “They are too conservative.”

About the time that she was being chosen 1943’s best-dressed cinemactress, Carole Landis was touring Tunisia, with her noteworthy figure encased in old-fashioned woolies. “I itched all the time,”, she recalled, “and when nobody was looking I scratched.”

King George VI ordered Buckingham Palace’s menservants out of their tail coats and white ties, into “battle dress” of less yardage, to save cloth and soap.

Week after the Episcopal Bishop of Albany denied the morale importance of cosmetics (TIME, March 22), high-styled Novelist Fannie Hurst declared that being “well-groomed and intelligently beautiful” was “essential to the morale of our American women . . . essential to the morale of the armed forces and to the civilian front.” Said she: “Our men are entitled to lovely women.”

Appearances had no place in 64-year-old Security Planner Sir William Henry Beveridge’s blueprint for “the ideal wife.” Said the groom of three months: “She should be intelligent without being intellectual, keen without being earnest, silent without being stupid.”

Gentleman from Indiana

Newton Booth Tarldngton, 73-year-old, nearly blind novelist, was worried about Indianapolis’ stray dogs. In the good old days before gas rationing many a motorist stopped at the pound on the city’s outskirts, for $4 rescued a pup from homelessness or death. Now there were few such rescuers. To the Indianapolis City Council, about to debate opening a dog shop in the center of town, Novelist Tarkington wrote a letter: “. . . Out of the myriads of creatures upon the earth only one, the dog . . . crossed the vast abyss that separates the species … I find few things in life more touching. . . . What is man’s response? . . . What of the underprivileged [dogs] who can’t even hope to be $4 dogs? The answer turns the heart sick. …” The city fathers voted to open the new shop.

The Open Road

Safe in London after flights to Italy, to North Africa, to Britain, New York’s Archbishop Francis Joseph Spellman (see p. 41) left Paddington Station in a limousine which promptly struck a parked car, crumpled a fender, smashed a wheel, blew a tire. The Archbishop was shaken but uninjured, planned to fly back to Africa next week.

Madame Chiang Kai-shek hopped from Manhattan to Chicago, spoke to a jampacked crowd in Chicago Stadium, got the key of the city from Mayor Kelly, $100,000 for China war relief from Harvester Heiress Mrs. Emmons (Anita McCormick) Blaine, headed West.

To Manhattan went unobtrusively elegant British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, from private meetings with Congressmen and State Department bigwigs, a last-minute call on Eleanor Roosevelt. He talked off-the-record to Manhattan newsmen, committed himself on the Brooklyn Dodgers (“A great ball team”), visited the Herald Tribune’s Ogden Reids. After a ’round-the-city sightseeing tour (including Coney Island), he was off to Washington again with Lord Halifax.

Doing road work (see cut) with his new-bought baseball club, the perennial last-place Phillies, was apple-shaped Owner William D. Cox, 33-year-old Manhattan lumberman, onetime catcher at New York University. He looked like a good prospect for his own talent-shy team.

Headed for Chicago to plead the case of the railroad brotherhoods, battling for higher wages, was Ambassador-nominee-resigned Edward Joseph Flynn, attorney.

Where Are They Now?

In Harlem once-famed Heavyweight Harry (“The Black Panther”) Wills, now 51, entered the third week of his annual monthlong hot-&-cold-water diet, was down from 260 Ib. to 215, felt “as full of vigor as when I was 21.”

In a Long Beach, Calif. hospital with a knife wound in his chest was retired Naval Commander Earl Winfield Spencer, 54, divorced first husband of the Duchess of Windsor. His wife, No. 4, said that his knife had slipped as he was trying to open a bottle of ketchup some time before 5 a.m.

Manhattan’s erstwhile best-known gangster and beerlegger, British-born Owen Victor (“Owney the Killer”) Madden, became a U.S. citizen in Hot Springs, Ark. One of the rare big-time racketeers who have retired with a whole skin, Madden moved to Hot Springs soon after he got out of Sing Sing ten years ago, now putters in his flower garden, dabbles in local uplift.