The Press: Pass the Chestnuts

One day last week, wrote Columnist Billy Rose, “a daffy story popped up on my desk” (the kidney-shaped one in the office Flo Ziegfeld used to use). It seemed, wrote Rose, that somebody’s spinster Aunt Helen had died, and when the minister drew back the casket lid at the funeral, what should be inside but the uniformed corpse of a two-star general? The embarrassed undertaker said they might as well go ahead with the service. Aunt Helen had apparently been buried in Arlington Cemetery that morning, and only an act of Congress could get her out.

“When a fellow gets rushed,” the undertaker apologized, “mistakes are bound to happen.”

Billy Rose might have used the same excuse for dishing out this chestnut as if it were fresh-roasted. If he had been reading rival Columnist Leonard Lyons last February he would have known better. In one week, six people had offered twists of the same yarn to Lennie—eleven years after he had first “naively printed” the tale. And only a week before Billy printed it, Lyons had again tagged it a legend. —

This week’s hot tip from Walter Winchell: “The most inflammable stuff on Toscanini (and Lily P. and André K.) is resting quietly on a publisher’s desk. It is a book tagged: The Other Side of the Record. Too Gee-Whiz for the printed page.” Actually, the book was resting quietly at most bookstores; it had been published in October and widely reviewed (TIME, Oct. 13).