People: People, Jun. 30, 1947

The Old Gang

Hamilton Fish, once a Congressman, said he was about to reappear as a magazine publisher; he proposed to counteract Henry Wallace’s New Republic influence. Also, said Fish, he would soon have a book out—”one dollar on newsstands, just like Wendell Willkie’s book, One World.”

George H. Earle, who used to be Governor of Pennsylvania and a U.S. diplomat in the Balkans, survived what he said was his 15th plane crash. When the wheels of an amphibian wouldn’t let down, the ship made a dry-land landing on pontoons at 70 m.p.h. Earle’s injury: a scratch on the wrist.

Norman Thomas, five times a candidate for President of the U.S. on the Socialist ticket, said he wouldn’t run any more. “Two or three times is all right,” explained Thomas, “but after that it gets to be a gesture.”

The Beautiful People

A hunter’s stray bullet forced down Hollywood Hero Jon Hall’s private plane, and Hall rose to the occasion. The bullet had just missed him, he told the breathless press. “You’d think the war was still on,” he added.* With him, said Hall, was his blues-singing wife, Frances Langford. The publicity was wonderful. Next day it was not so wonderful. Pressed for details, Hall finally confessed that neither he nor his wife had been in the plane at the time. Said he: “I wish this would be forgotten. Too much fuss has been made. . . .”

Actress June Haver, who married a musician last March in Las Vegas and then married him again in Hollywood, said she would now divorce him. Alan Stephan, “Mr. America of 1946,” married Grace Pomazal, “Miss Quick Freeze.” Hedy Lamarr’s estranged husband, Actor John Loder, who had been pricked in a dueling scene, had a sword-tip cut from his thigh. And Actor Chester Morris broke his leg in two places dancing at a children’s party.

The Literary Life

Reactivated: H. L. Mencken, Baltimore’s oldest volcano; by Columnist Earl Wilson, who interviewed him. The volcano showed its age; the new rumblings were as sensationally noisy as the outbursts of the ’20s, but now they sounded a lot more hollow: “I’m in favor of war and hope it starts soon. . . . The country enjoys war. . . . [The Japanese] are the only intelligent Orientals. . . . There’s not an honest man in China. That reminds me, no American Indian has ever been worth a jolly good God damn, either. . . . [On Harry Truman] That quack! … [On Harold Stassen] Another quack … A Republican Henry Wallace.”

Also reactivated, with a difference: Sinclair Lewis, who made his first big noise lambasting all the herd-minded Americans who join lodges and wear funny hats at male get-togethers. A Yale class reunion brought Lewis running, obediently decked in the herd’s badges and wearing the standard reunion headpiece (see cut).

Forfeited, by John Dewey: a share in his first wife’s estate ($68,565 net). Papers filed in a Manhattan court showed that she left him a share provided that he stay single. She died in 1927. After 19 years, Philosopher Dewey, 87, remarried last winter.

Mary Roberts Rinehart, after nearly 40 years of turning out imaginative whodunits, found herself, at 70, face to face with hair-raising reality. Scene: the library of the 24-room Rinehart mansion in fashionable Bar Harbor, Me. (probable locale of her murderous The Yellow Room). Enter Bias Reyes, her trusted Filipino chef of 25 years, coatless and off-balance. Exit the butler.

“Where is your coat?” demanded Authoress Rinehart.

“Here it is,” replied the chef, and pulled a revolver from his hip pocket. Weaving, he leveled it at her. It clicked. Mrs. Rinehart screamed, ran for the pantry, and snatched up the telephone. The revolver clicked again. The chauffeur and a maid dashed into the room, disarmed the chef, who made it to the pantry and gathered up three knives. Then the chauffeur jumped the chef, disarmed him again and held him until the police arrived. That night, in his jail cell, the chef hanged himself.

The motive? Confessed Author Rinehart, who has written many a tale about derangement and crime: “I can’t think what. …”

Inherited, from British Novelist Matthew Phipps Shiel: his home in Sussex, England; by a 13-year-old boy in Brooklyn, N.Y., whom Shiel had never met. Neither had he met the boy’s mother, but she had once written him a fan letter, and the thing grew.

A Shiel legend was that he had once been king of Redonda.* “My Irish father had an admiration for kings,” Shiel once wrote, “and on my 15th birthday he had me crowned King of Redonda by the Bishop of Antigua. . . .” But he was better known to the Brooklyn boy’s mother, Mrs. Annamarie Miller, as the romantic writer of high-flown fantasies (The Purple Cloud, The Lord of the Sea). Mrs. Miller, now 45, wrote him her first fan letter when she was 29. The novelist wrote back. She wrote again. In his third letter, Romanticist Shiel wrote: “I think you’d better run away and come to me.” She broke the news that she was married. But Shiel kept on writing to her until he died at 81. In 1933, when her son was born, Shiel wrote: “The event is historical in the passion of my life.”

Said Mrs. Miller last week of the man she never saw: “I loved him, certainly, but there was none of this passion thing the papers talk about. … I only wish I could have lived next door so that I could have typed and done odd jobs and taken care of him.” How did Mrs. Miller’s husband, Thomas, a garage owner, feel about all this? Said Mrs. Miller: “I think he’s rather proud. …”

*Hall spent six months in the Army, all in the U.S.

*A ⅓-square-mile rock of an island in the West Indies.