People: Royalty

5 minute read
TIME

George VI won the House of Commons’ permission to have Princess Elizabeth serve as one of the councilors of state in the event of his absence from the country after her 18th birthday next April. Purpose: “experience in the duties which would fall upon her in the event of her accession to the throne.”

The Duke & Duchess of Windsor, having found the Duchess’ 70-year-old “Aunt Bessie” Merryman nicely recovering in a Boston hospital from a broken hip, moved on to Newport for genteel whoop-de-do. Boston newspapers had counted the couple’s luggage, duly reported 31 pieces. For that, the Duchess gave interviewers a lecture, called it all “most extraordinary,” pointed out that the 31 pieces were not just for herself and husband but also a maid, a valet and a secretary. Wrote Herald Columnist Bill Cunningham: “Possibly I’m stupid but it seems to me that this makes it all incredibly worse—five people and all this culch loading up a common carrier in times such as these just to call upon an ailing aunt. . . .”

Men of Substance

Lieut. Colonel John Hay (“Jock”) Whitney was closing a deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to sell them his 95% interest in Gone with the Wind. Reported price for the four-year-old colossity: $3 million.

Errol Flynn got into the trouble news again. The U.S. filed a tax lien against him for $121,858 allegedly owing on last year’s income. Sean, his two-and-a-half-year-old son, got his foot caught in a drainpipe in Newport (where he was winding up the summer with his mother, Lili Damita), had to be sawed free by police and firemen.

Joseph Stalin suddenly got a patter of backslaps from a number of thoughtful U.S. citizens: two men in swampy Vermilion Parish, La. took out a $25 war bond in his name, planned to send it to him; the residents of Newton, Mass, sent $1,300 worth of bonds to him “and the Russian people”; and 76-year-old S. Kent Costikyan, Manhattan’s rug king, proposed in a letter to the New York Times that somebody give him some sort of honorary degree.

William Gillette, the theater’s late great Sherlock Holmes, was presumably at ease about the overwhelming stone castle and miniature railway he left on his hilltop estate at Hadlyme, Conn. The borzoi-faced star had been the live-steaming engineer on his three-mile Connecticut Nutmeg & Great Western, whipped his friends wildly about in its little observation cars. When he died in 1937 at the age of 71, he declared in his will: “I would consider it more than unfortunate for me should I find myself doomed after death to a continued consciousness of the behavior of mankind on this planet, to discover that . . . my home . . . my railway line with its bridges, trestles, tunnels . . . my locomotives and cars . . . should reveal themselves to me as in the possession of some blithering saphead who had no conception of where he is or with what surrounded.” Last week, after six years of sidestepping sapheads, the executors of the estate had found a solution. The castle and grounds they sold to the State of Connecticut as a public park and bird sanctuary; the CN&GW they sold to an amusement park.

Litterateurs

John Masefield, now 65, was moved to pen a letter to the London Times. Virtually the only solace he and his wife had got out of any newspapers in years, wrote the poet, was the Times’s crossword puzzles.

“Mr. Bernard Shaw,” wrote the recently widowed 87-year-old playwright to the Irish Times, “has received such a prodigious mass of letters on the occasion of his wife’s death that though he has read and valued them all, any attempt to acknowledge them individually is beyond his power. He therefore begs his friends and hers to be content with this omnibus reply and to assure them that a very happy ending to a very long life has left him awaiting his own turn in perfect serenity.”

Bertie Charles Forbes, Hearst financial columnist, publisher (Forbes Magazine), author (Keys to Success), was sued for a separation by his wife Adelaide after 28 years. She charged that her husband is a “bully, egotist, tyrant and bore,” and that she had to “draw his bath, lay out his clothes, button his shirt and underwear, cut his toenails, lace his shoes and open his car door for him.”

Lucius Bee be reported to his readers across the country that “the imported-champagne situation” has “at long last achieved a real crisis.”

Funnymen

W. C. Fields and his nose emerged for their seventh annual round against Charlie McCarthy, brandished some new taunts on NBC’s air (“You woodpecker’s blue-plate!”), and retired leaving a large audience eager for the eighth round.

Bob Burns, papa of the peacetime bazooka, traveled to Texas’ Camp Hood, for the first time laid eyes on his trademark’s military namesake (TIME, April 5), found it too large for his mouth.

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