People: People, Apr. 23, 1945

Personal Preferences

Gloria Vanderbilt di Cicco almost ran down her newest romance (according to the gossip columnists) when Maestro Leopold Stokowski stepped off a train at Truckee, Calif, into a Sierra Nevada snowstorm to help wait out her Reno divorce (due April 20). Meeting him in a secondhand Cadillac which she had just learned to drive, Gloria released the clutch as he crossed in front of the car. Only a cadenza-like leap saved him. Unruffled, the heiress drove him to her Lake Tahoe cabin while Manhattan friends & relatives dispatched frantic wires warning her not to marry the sixtyish conductor. Working on the side of the anti-romancers was 1) Stoky’s shingles, 2) the weather (which did Stoky’s neuritis no good), 3) the carbolated vaseline (to rub on his chest).

Irving Berlin came home from a three-months’ tour of the Pacific war areas with a new song described as “a serviceman’s lament.” Chorus:

Oh, to be home again, cross the foam again, and be home again,

Just one morning, pounding my head, just one breakfast, served in my bed,

Oh, to emerge again, in blue serge again, for a splurge again …

Oh, how I long to be home.

William Ralph Inge (rhymes with sing), 84, retired “Gloomy Dean” of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, who once charged that Martin Luther (rather than Hitler) was the “evil genius” of Germany, let fly another rouser: “The truth is that it is difficult not to like the Germans when one meets them in private life. . . . I do not think that the mass of German people wanted this war. … I cannot help hoping that if we have to occupy part of Germany we shall let our unwilling hosts see the best side of us.”

New Horizons

Fala, Franklin Roosevelt’s shaggy black Scotty and near-constant companion, rode his master’s funeral train from Warm Springs to Washington, was exercised at station stops by U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Arthur Prettyman, Mr. Roosevelt’s genial valet (see cut). Five-year-old Fala attended the Hyde Park burial services with his former mistress, the President’s cousin Margaret Suckley (who has taken him back), cowered and whimpered at the gun salute, rolled over on the grass (the President’s favorite Fala trick) during the hymn. In spite of barking furiously at the parting volleys, he was led away quietly at the end—still the best-behaved of Roosevelt pets (predecessors nipped ex-Senator Hattie Caraway and wolfed down a dozen plates of ham & eggs from the servants’ dining room).

Major William C. Bullitt, 54, elegant ex-U.S. Ambassador to France, now of the French Army (he was rejected by the U.S. Army because of age), was appointed military governor of Baden-Baden, elegant German watering place (which was captured by General de Tassigny’s French troops).

Sari Gabor, redhaired, green-eyed “Miss Hungary” of 1936, planning to divorce Hotel Chainman Conrad Hilton, coolly figured it should cost him a cool $10,000,000. Living on the cuff at Manhattan’s plushy Plaza Hotel (one of her husband’s), she told an eye-popping tale: last year she suffered a nervous breakdown, was kept for six months thereafter “in continuous slumber” through injections of a “mysterious” drug and 18 sleeping tablets a day. When she finally regained consciousness, she weighed only 80 pounds (said she). Husband Hilton gave her a separate agreement of $2,000 monthly, $35,000 in cash, community interest in his Hollywood holdings, six months free lodging at the Plaza.

Time & Tides

Westbrook Pegler, splenetic, Hearst-harbored columnist, registered as a Democratic voter of Pima County, Ariz., announced that he would sell his 35-acre farm at Ridgefield, Conn, with its picture-book-pretty Bavarian-Alpine chalet. Said ex-Squire Pegler: “I’ve given up farming. I haven’t got the time.”

Max Schmeling, 40, black-browed onetime world heavyweight boxing champion—now a gaunt caricature of his ring days because of bad food and Nazi “discipline”—was reported to be in a German Army deserters’ camp near Bremen.

Major General Edwin M. (“Pa”) Watson, Franklin Roosevelt’s longtime appointment secretary and military aide, who died at sea Feb. 20 while returning from the Crimea conference, left an estate estimated by his widow at $1,577 ($525 in mining stock, $500 in personal effects, $552 in salary and allowances due).