People: People, Nov. 11, 1946

Blighted Areas

Raised above the ruck of workaday unfortunates by the special quality of their afflictions were two people: Jack-of-All-Theatrics Orson Welles and Jill-of-All-Parties Elsa Maxwell.

Great-headed Welles got scratched by a poisonous nettle while he was making a picture in Mexico, and found himself wearing a face swollen to thrice its normal size. It stayed that way for three hours.

Miss Maxwell, the world’s most publicized party-thrower, tried to put on a big Opera Ball in Chicago. Chicagoans were not charmed by a Maxwell column, six weeks before the date, which remarked: “It is hard to persuade these rather timid, frightened Chicagoans to come as Rigolettos and Carmens, but I think they will see the light. . . .” Tickets went unsold at $50 a couple, then went unsold at $25. The project was sunk without a trace. Miss Maxwell’s last words: “For some curious reason, which is quite inexplicable to me, apparently the public did not want to come. . . .”

Literary Life

John Steinbeck, on a junket to Scandinavia, got a hero’s welcome. Reporters and cameramen woke him at 4 a.m. the morning after his arrival in Sweden; reporters stuck with him on the seven-hour-ride by train and ferry to Copenhagen; more boarded the train at every stop. Cried one Copenhagen paper: “John

Steinbeck, all of Denmark is at your feet.” A customs guard at the border demanded whether Steinbeck carried whiskey (Ans.: “Lots—I live on it”), cigarets (Ans.: “I chain-smoke”), decided: “In your case that’s fine, as long as I may have your autograph.”

In Manhattan, where the courts were trying to decide whether the gamy Memoirs of Hecate County was indecent, Author Edmund Wilson suffered a really staggering blow. One judge’s word for the book: “ponderous.”

Nobody knew how William Shakespeare and Miguil de Cervantes Saavedra were feeling. New editions* of Macbeth and Don Quixote were to come out with illustrations by Salvador Dali.

And Poet Alfred Noyes was writing an adaptation of his moonlit poem, The Highwayman, for production by Hollywood.

Royalty

The Duke of Windsor got a chat with Prime Minister Clement Atlee in London, but still no job, and it looked as if the U.S. would be getting him and the Duchess again next week.

Argentina resumed relations with Rumania, and almost instantly Carol & Magda, still in Brazil, were reported ready with Argentine visas.

Prince Carl Gustav, next in line for Sweden’s throne after his grandfather (Crown Prince Gustav Adolf) and father (Prince Gustav Adolf), was enjoying the best year of a monarch’s life—his first, with the throne as remote as it would ever be, his world still a sharkless sea of love, and every mistake forgiven. But he was already being equipped for man’s estate: from the mountain Lapps he had a gift of a shield, and from Cousin Count Folke Bernadotte he had a pair of gold cuff links.

Dreamland Set

Sally Rand got pinched again for showing those old landmarks—this time in Los Angeles—and protested again about how artistic it really was. Errol Flynn said he was going to open a $100,000 “floating cabaret” off Acapulco, Mexico, in January and his wife Nora, who expects a baby in February, said he was going to sail off to Tahiti and come back to her about February. Millionaire Producer Howard Hughes and Partner Preston Sturges busted up after a squabble over an unfinished picture—to be called Vendetta—which had already cost more than a million dollars. And in Mexico, Bandsman Artie Shaw, who has had four other wives, including Lana Turner, married Kathleen (Forever Amber) Winsor, who has only had one other husband; and Artie still had about a year to wait till his California divorce became final.

Sporting Life

Sportsmen were not having a particularly happy week. Wild Animal Catcher Frank Buck was clawed by Chicago traffic—got a deep cut over one eye in a taxicab smashup. The Cleveland Indians’ President Bill Veeck, whose right foot was smashed by a gun’s recoil on Bougainville, finally had it amputated after more than two years’ trouble with it.

Alice Marble, ex-Tenniste No. 1, who has lately dabbled in almost everything, talked wistfully of a new career at 33—she was now hopefully “looking for that right fellow to come around the corner,” she said. “More than anything else in the world now, I want to be married, have a home in the country and two children.”

Probably the week’s most vivid utterance came from Joe Di Maggio, who complained that his name had been wrongfully used to promote a political rally. “I don’t know anything about politics,” said Joe. “I keep my nose clean, on one side and the other.”

The Very Best

The Metropolitan Opera would open next week under the best of all possible auspices, and with customary glitter and tinsel.

Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt had her old box on the left, and Ganna Walska balanced her over on the right. The old J. P. Morgan box at the center of the horseshoe was still safe in the hands of Thomas J. Watson (International Business Machines); and the Myron Taylors (finance and diplomacy) once again dared Box 13. The Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitneys had a box, and the Cornelius Dresselhuyses, and Mrs. Otto Kahn, and the Duchess de Tallyrand, and the fashionable Byron Foys, and Balletomane George de Cuevas (an ex-marquis), to say nothing of McNair llgenfritz, Captain Ignatius Fischl, and Mr. & Mrs. Fareed Najeeb Kiamie. Everything was all set (see MUSIC).

Captains

U.N.’s Secretary General Trygve Lie and his chauffeur got stopped by a traffic cop in New Rochelle, N.Y. for allegedly going 50 in a 40 m.p.h. zone. The court case against the chauffeur this week might settle the question: How much immunity do U.N. people rightfully have from local laws?

During last week’s garbage-workers’ strike in New Orleans, Mayor de Lesseps Morrison helped sweeten the city by getting into Army fatigues (and paratroop boots) and shoveling swill at the disposal plant.

Housing Expediter Wilson W. Wyatt crushed an old libel: that children are housewreckers. In nine cases out of ten, said he, housewives did more wrecking than children.

Legacies

Spanish names made tragic news: Madrid reported that Mario, son of the late, best-selling Novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), had been sentenced to twelve years in prison on a charge of having once been a Mason. He might get a commutation: he is paralyzed, deaf and nearly blind.

In Brunnell, Fla., Dominican President Rafael Trujillo’s adopted nephew, Jose Adrian Trujillo Seijas, was shot dead outside a café by a sheriff’s deputy. The sheriff said the cafe people had mistaken Trujillo and a friend for Negroes, and refused to serve them; a disturbance followed, and the deputy fired in selfdefense.

* A Shakespeare First Folio copy (there are some 200 of them) went at auction to an anonymous New Yorker last week for $22,000 —a good price, but way below the record: $77,000.