People: People, Jun. 28, 1943

Gasoline Romance

A few days after 18-year-old Oona O’Neill had described her eight-month acquaintance with Charles Chaplin as “entirely on the esoteric side,” the comedian packed sleek, sloe-eyed Oona into a car, picked up the certificate and a case of champagne at Santa Barbara, sped to coastal Carpinteria, nervously found the finger for her first and his fourth wedding ring,* hid himself and his bride somewhere in Montecito.

Only the week before he had agreed to pay his pre-Oona protegee Joan Berry $2,500 down, legal costs, and support until the blood test which may or may not show that he did not father her unborn child. From the white house in the San Francisco hills where Chaplin’s new, recently ailing father-in-law Eugene O’Neill† works with his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, on a long awaited cycle of plays, no word came. The bride’s mother sent congratulations. Said Joan Berry: “He can’t do this to us.”

Among the newlyweds’ first callers were OPA men goaded into action by calls from other pairs who wanted gasoline for their honeymoons. The agents wanted to find out why Chaplin had used two cars, how he had filled their tanks, whether he had driven 80 miles an hour.

Parts of Speeches

“Ochlocracy is but the inchoate rococo of mob rule, bred on febrile emotions and unrestraint,” said Wellesley-educated Mme. Chiang Kai-shek to Canada’s Parliament. She also spoke of Germany’s “immane dictatorship.”*

A general call for plain talk in high places came from Barnard College’s veteran Dean Virginia Gildersleeve. She wondered why the New York City War Council felt it necessary to say: “Illumination is required to be extinguished before these premises are closed to business.”†

Taking and Giving

British Funnyman Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, a “nonpolitical” radio voice from Berlin (TIME, May 25, 1942), was asked by the U.S. to pay $21,328 in back taxes, plus penalties and interest of $17,382.

In Los Angeles, a Federal court agreed with golden blonde Cinemactress Madeleine Carroll that the 51 orphans she once supported at her onetime home near Paris were “dependents,” returned to her $6,800 in taxes.

Cafe Society

Bearded British Philosopher Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, plumber for polygamy, last week recommended four additional postwar freedoms: free gambling, freer drinking, cafe terraces and Sunday shows. To attract tourists to the Isles, he suggested that Britons “stop treating foreigners as monsters of immorality and freaks of eccentricity. . . . Also we should learn to cook.”

Time for Truth

Massachusetts’ florid-faced, iron-grey Charles L Gifford, 72, a Representative from Cape Cod for 22 years, told the House just when a Congressman can be fearless: “It seems Wendell Phillips once said that when a statesman, socalled, arrives at 70 and when he no longer has any hope of being President, you can get the truth out of him.”

Flesh and Spirit

Somewhere in England, hawk-faced Colonel General Jurgen von Arnim, captive commander of Axis North African armies, complained of a soldier’s ailment (flat feet). He also showed signs of a beaten general’s occupational ailments—mental depression and an anxiety neurosis. For the latter trouble, the British called in a psychiatrist.

Archduke Otto, 30-year-old Pretender to the throne of the nonexistent Austrian Empire, presumably fit for the Army, learned that he would be called to his local board within two months. His project to organize a special U.S. Army battalion of Austro-Hungarians had been abandoned by the Army and State Department as a nuisance.

Sidney Franklin, the Brooklyn bullfighter, trying to correct a 4-F rating, underwent an operation on a wound dating back to a goring he suffered in Madrid 13 years ago.

Memory Book

Charged with not returning to the trade many a borrowed gem Manhattan cafe society Jeweler Paul E. Flato filed against liabilities of $805,662 a list of accounts.

Flato ‘s cuff had been extended liberally to Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller ($1,320). Oth er accounts receivable: Brenda Diana Duff Frazier ($585); Marlene Dietrich ($50); Gloria Laura Vanderbilt ($1,018); Gloria Swanson ($692); Mrs. Alfred G. Vander bilt ($1,096) ; Doris Duke Cromwell ($60).

*Previous Chaplin wives: Mildred Harris (1918-20), Lita Grey (1924-27), Paulette Goddard (1936-42).†O’Neill offspring: by 1909-12 wife Kathleen Jenkins, 33-year-old Yale assistant professor of Greek Eugene Jr.; by 1918-29 wife Agnes Boulton, 23-year-old seaman Shane, Oona.

*Freely translated: mob rule, like Nazi dictatorship, is nasty business.

† Freely translated: “Turn out the lights before you go home.”