People: People, Mar. 3, 1947

Blondes

“I hereby give my entire estate,” ran the will of Edgar H. Donne, 70, who lived & died in a one-room shack on a barren Michigan farm, “to Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, screen actress, whose stage name is Greta Garbo, to her and no other.” Neighbors recalled that Donne had once bought himself some new clothes and set out for Hollywood; after he got back he never talked about it. He once wrote Garbo a letter; it came back stamped “Refused.” The local probate judge estimated that lonely Hermit Donne was worth about $20,000. Postscript to the will: “If Greta Garbo becomes my wife, then it goes to Greta Lovisa Donne.” One neighbor firmly believed that Donne was a descendant of Elizabethan Poet John Donne (“I must love her that loves not me”).

For another popular blonde, money was not so easy. Betty Grable and trumpeting husband Harry James wanted satisfaction from a couple of fellows who had allegedly sold them seven race horses. The Jameses filed suit, complained that they had paid $105,000 for the horses, spent another $3,000 on them, and they were still just dogs. The James’s offer: they would trade the horses for their money back (plus the $3,000). Otherwise they wanted $68,000 damages.

Hard Times

Things were tough all over. While he was away from home, Radio Commentator Fulton Lewis Jr.’s eleven-room Maryland manse burned to the ground. Estimated loss: $100,000. John L. Lewis’ maiden daughter, Kathryn, 35, who lives in wooded country not far from Sing Sing, N.Y., got a permit to keep a pistol.

It was “routine,” said the now inactive union boss (U.M.W. District 50): “I live in a sparsely settled section.” At Miami Beach, gunmen who robbed the Beachcomber nightclub got the jewels stored there by Veteran Torchsinger Sophie (“Last of the Red Hot Mammas”) Tucker. Her estimate: $75,000. Ex-Scandals Producer George White, six months in a California work camp after an auto accident in which he killed two people, lost his plea for parole (he said he had pyorrhea and a bum knee), went back to tending sheep. When fire broke out in the radio of her husband’s private plane, Cinemadventuress Veronica Lake smothered it with her mink coat, was forced to appear in furs borrowed from a friend. Frank Sinatra was bedded in Acapulco, Mexico, with intestinal trouble and a high fever. Crooner Dick Haymes went to bed for a week with sinus trouble. Trombonist Jack Teagarden, whose theme song is I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues, was sued for divorce. Errol Flynn, back to Hollywood from Jamaica for the birth of his second wife’s second child, had a broken foot (from tennis, he said).

Kudos

With blossom time at hand, the academic groves automatically began putting forth laurels.

At Johns Hopkins University, the British Ambassador, Lord Inverchapel, got an honorary LL.D.

At Princeton and at Columbia, Secretary of State George C. Marshall also got an honorary LL.D. The General was in cosmopolitan company at Princeton. Among his honored fellows: Historian Arnold J. Toynbee (honorary LL.D.), Cinemactor Jimmy Stewart (honorary M.A.), New York Park Commissioner Robert Moses (honorary LL.D.), Broadway Producer-Director-Actor Jose Ferrer (honorary M.A.).

Like Marshall’s, Admiral William F. Halsey’s cup was overflowing. At Columbia, he got an’ honorary LL.D.; in Philadelphia, the local chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution handed him its Good Citizenship Medal.

Columbia’s blossoms blanketed all the brass in sight. Honorarily LL.D.’d, besides Marshall and Halsey: General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Admiral Ernest J. King, General Alexander A. Vandegrift, Vice Admiral Emory S. Land (ret.), Major General Lewis B. Hershey, Major General Norman T. Kirk and (in absentia) General Henry H. Arnold and General Douglas MacArthur.

At New York University, the Hall of

Fame people reported that the niches reserved for Revolutionary Philosopher Thomas Paine and Yellow Fever Fighter Walter Reed—both elected to the Hall in 1945—still lacked busts (nobody has yet come through with funds to provide them).

The Literary Life

Bostonians who wanted to see Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh would have to see it elsewhere—maybe in suburban Quincy, where they saw his banned Strange Interlude in 1929. Boston’s censor, who had demanded that some blunt words be dropped from the play, got a blunt reply from O’Neill: “Idiotic. … I will not change, nor allow to be changed, one word. . . . Boston audiences, I am sure … do not want plays . . . made silly by … stupid censorship. . . .”

Publisher Sherman H. Bowles (cousin of ex-OPA Boss Chester), whose four Springfield, Mass., newspapers have been on strike since last fall, crashed a picket line to deliver copies of his strike-crippled Daily News, wound up in police court. Publisher Bowles had the enterprise to pilot a delivery truck himself, lacked the foresight to carry a driver’s license. Fine: $25.

Readers of syndicated Columnist Billy Rose got some inside dope that confirmed an old suspicion. Showman Rose, noted as a judge of beauty, confessed that “all this stuff about my being a picker of pretties is loo-proof malarkey. And the same goes for Ziegfeld, Carroll, White and Goldwyn. . . . Any boy who likes girls can pick them.” How to do it for a show: “You put an ad in the paper. . . . Several hundred gals show up. . . . First you eliminate the impossibles. . . . You ask the remaining girls to parade. . . . What do you look for? The same things you look for when you’re standing on a windy corner.”