How It Is

To an interviewer in Manhattan, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist Ellen Glasgow, ill last summer, disclosed that she believed she had been dead. Her account: "The doctor had his fingers on my pulse. He said, 'She's gone,' to my sister. And I was gone. I was dead. . . . It was like being taken up and carried, like being enveloped in a great, surging, slow tide--and it was bliss. A slow tide."

How It Should Be

Mrs. Oliver Harriman, onetime society leader in Manhattan, living now in a two-room hotel apartment, brought out a 72-chapter, 646-page guide to good manners. Mrs. Oliver Harriman's Book of Etiquette (Greenberg; $3) starts at the start ("Good manners begin in the cradle"), goes right to the finish ("Care should be taken in selecting a reliable funeral director"). Her observations are perceptive and practical. The book is infinitely detailed, as if Mrs. Harriman, a woman of firm grip and general sensibility, had found over the years that most Americans are fuzzy-minded, bewildered, perhaps even dopey. For instance, she tells how to get a stepladder for an upper berth: "Ring for the porter and he will bring one." How to mind your own business: "If a friend receives a personal telephone call, never attempt to hear what she is talking about."

Prizes & Enterprises

Minnesota's bluff, ruddy Congressman Melvin Joseph Maas, colonel in the Marines, returned to Washington from action in the Southwest Pacific, wearing the Silver Star for conspicuous service. He led an air hunt for Jap cruisers, found none, but shot up a couple of airdromes before returning to base. Jay Cooke III, great-grandson of the famed Civil War financier, an ex-socialite now a rock-jawed, boot-tough soldier, won a lieutenant colonel's silver leaves on maneuvers in Louisiana (see cut). Senator A. B. ("Happy") Chandler's 16-year-old torchsinging daughter Mimi went to Hollywood from Kentucky, won a screen test that won her a seven-year contract with Paramount. Into a movie as vocalists with jump-&-jive Bob Crosby's band went a pair of richly endowed twins (see cut): scrumptious Lee & Lynn Wilde, 18, who swore they were the grandnieces of Epigrampus Oscar Wilde. In Miami, Albert John Capone, younger brother of Scarface Al, changed his family's name to Rayola.

Haircraft

Shape of the world's second-best-known mustache, said Charles Spencer Chaplin, will be changed for the first time in more than 20 years of picturemaking. The new model will be a delicate Gallic affair to fit a cinesatire on Henri Landru, the French Bluebeard. Wendell Willkie, back home in Rushville (see p. 20), eagerly looked forward to his first haircut since Cairo, 6,500 miles, six weeks back. From Vichy came an eye-catching picture of dapper Porfirio Rubirosa, Dominican charge d'affaires, his smart new wife, Cinemactress Danielle Darrieux, her hat --a full-fashioned, high-riding model reminiscent of a quilted, candy-stuffed, $5 valentine--the first Paris style news in months (see cut).

That Place

To counter the nation's notion that Hollywood was the wild-goings-on center of the world, Will Hays's minions have diligently spread word for years that Hollywood is in truth a dull, home-cooking hamlet where the starry citizens mow lawns in the evenings before the sidewalks are rolled up. Last week's news:

Clean-cut-looking Cineswashbuckler Errol Flynn was charged by the district attorney with rape (see p. 96). Johnny ("Tarzan") Weissmuller was briefly jugged (till he furnished bail) for drunken driving. So was Wrestler George Zaharias. So was famed Test Pilot Vance Breese. Neighbors of Helen Lee Worthing, once-famed Ziegfeld beauty, charged she had been screaming, keeping them awake, had her arrested for being drunk on private property. Plump Cinecomedienne Marie Wilson suddenly stripped to her black-lace corselet in the Los Angeles police commissioner's office to publicize a stage show.

All this seemed like old times. Then at week's end the colony dutifully put on a public display of more lawful high jinks. In a football stadium Rita Hayworth's "Hollywood Wolves" team played Betty Grable's "Comedians." Referee was Musicomedian Victor Moore. Players popped out of a hole in the field; the kick-off sent a phony ball floating out of the stadium; at one point all the players suddenly produced hidden balls and ran for 22 touchdowns at once; a stripteuse rose out of a huddle, and the "Comedians" chased her; Cinecomic Clyde Cook took off his pants and did a bubble dance; another man shot off a gun; and so the afternoon passed.

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