People: People, Jan. 25, 1943

“I Sometimes Wonder . . .”

On his rolling wooded farm in Surrey lion-headed, frost-maned David Lloyd George read the telegrams that kept coming in, listened to the honors done him over the radio, found he had achieved the age of 80. To the press he explained his age: “I can’t help it. It is really nothing,” but the teeth-rattling quality of his career belied him. In 100 years only four other men who had suffered the slings & arrows of a Prime Minister’s existence had ever reached such an age.* At 80, Lloyd George, Prime Minister through two years of War I and four beyond, who had never been a mealymouth in his prime, sounded exactly like young Lloyd George. He recalled Admiral Jellicoe (“an obstinate man . . . fundamentally weak, he did not even carry out orders when they were given to him”), Herbert Asquith (“no war minister . . . able, but no man of action”), Foch (“simple, honorable, and absolutely fearless”), Bonar Law (“not a man of action”), Ramsay MacDonald (“too timid”), and “Blockhead (Stanley) Baldwin.” On Britain’s conduct of the current war: “I sometimes wonder what we are doing. Here we are in the fourth year of the war and we’ve hardly tackled our main enemy, Germany.”

Strained Interlude

For 72 hours it looked as if Errol Flynn’s trial for statutory rape was about to come to a premature end. Alleged rapee Betty Hansen had told her intimate story in court. Admiring women had ogled Flynn in court and begged his autograph. Then a bombshell was exploded by the prosecution in accusing two jurors (women) of using fraud and deceit in their eagerness to get on the jury—concealing the fact that they had already made up their minds about the case. But after a conference the judge dismissed one juror and ordered the case to go on—saving the show from a dreadful anticlimax.

Interlude

After seven years of bucking Hollywood, intense, sensitive, beautiful Cinemactress Frances Farmer, who had never troubled to conform, was in a Los Angeles hospital last week. Given a six months suspended sentence for drunken driving last October, she was hailed to court again last week for getting into a drunken fracas, fought and kicked in the courtroom, was sent away for mental observation.

Armed Forces

Into the Army in Manhattan went Prince Gaëtan de Bourbon-Parme, 37-year-old brother of former Empress Zita of Austria-Hungary, week after the induction of his nephews (Archdukes) Felix and Charles Ludwig. The nephews will probably wind up in the much-criticized battalion of Austrian nationals promoted by brother Pretender Otto, but Uncle Gaëtan, a descendant of Louis XIV, is a French citizen and ineligible.

Cinemactor Freddie Bartholomew, 18year-old ex-child star, was sworn into the Army Air Forces in Los Angeles as a ground crewman. British-born, he took out his first U.S. citizenship papers last March, can automatically become a citizen after three months in the service. Last week, looking ahead, he figured the war “might be over in time for me to do some more acting.”

Promoted from major to lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps was Playwright Laurence Stallings (What Price Glory? with Collaborator Maxwell Anderson), War I veteran now on active duty in Washington with the Army Air Forces.

Still working on his biggest-American-woodcarving, an 18-ft. statue of Paul Bunyan (TIME, July 27, 1942), Sculptor Carroll Barnes was called to the Army in Visalia, Calif. Last week the weary sculptor hung a sign on the half-finished sculpture: “Paul Bunyan—gone to war.”

Promoted from corporal to sergeant: the Army’s best-selling Humorist Marion (See Here, Private Hargrove) Hargrove.

Joe Di Maggio (.305 last year), in Reno with Wife Dorothy, who was there for the second time in nine months, patched it up again, announced he was going to try to get into the Army Air Forces soon—”just as soon as I can get a few things straightened out.”

Arrested in Washington by the FBI: tireless, sour-faced, 74-year-old Edward Page Gaston, military-minded, anti-liquor crusader, brother of the late, famed anti-cigaret crusader Lucy Page Gaston. Founder of the World Prohibition Federation, he organized something called The Patriot Guard of America in 1937, planned to set up a private army for the protection of the country against radicals. The charge against him last week: illegally wearing the uniform of a U.S. Army captain.

Comer

Science-minded Herbert George Wells, 76, looker-both-ways (The Outline of History, The Shape of Things To Come), is hard at work on a thesis he hopes will win him a master’s degree in science from London University. Subject: “Personalities of the Mesozoics.”

*Palmerston, Russell, Gladstone, Balfour.