Shapes
Naval Lieut. (j.g.) Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt is going to marry her, said Hollywood's contour de force K. T. Stevens. The millionaire peacetime sportsman, divorced last year by Manuela Hudson, is now PT Boating in the South Pacific.* "It isn't official, exactly," said K.T., "but we're mutually agreed. . .. We hope--I mean, I hope--we can be married when he gets his next leave."
Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., cousin of Alfred, chatted of his widowed mother in Script magazine: "Mother is back in town after a month at Hot Springs, Va., where she went to recondition her 'pump' and her 'plumbing.' ... I thought she looked better before going there."
Dolly De Milhau, wartime correspondent for Town & Country, reported from the Florida front: "Next time you're wondering where anybody is, I suggest you come down to Miami Beach, park a camp chair . . . and just sit and wait. Sooner or later everyone you've ever known or heard of is sure to wander by. ... As for the maid situation, there are no maids in Florida. Everybody does her own housework. The usual household consists of a nurse for the children, a cleaning woman two or three times a week, and Madame with her sleeves rolled up the rest of the time."
Members
Frank Sinatra's left eardrum kept him out of the Army. He made a sleeper-jump from a Boston date to one with the Army's doctors in Newark, learned that the drum was punctured, learned that he ought to get more sleep, learned that he was now 4-F, moved on to a two-week stand in Pittsburgh.
Coast Guardsman Victor Mature's molars were tugged out in Boston--two of the few that never showed in photographs. He confided to the local press the things most desired by every sailor when he reaches port: a soft bed and a dirty joke.
Salvador Dali's mustaches performed for Lucius Beebe, who reported in his column that he had noted their "convulsive flutterings and bristlings" in a Manhattan nightclub as the misfortunate artist spied "a pair of absolutely identical handlebars" across the room.
Politicos
Lord Burghley (rhymes with Pat Hurley), new Governor of Bermuda, ex-Olympic hurdler, got a free auto--the one the colony had bought for Governor Viscount Knollys (rhymes with Chester Bowles). The outgoing Governor, given permission by the Assembly to drive after two wartime, autoless years, had resigned before the little car arrived from England.
Prentiss M. Brown, ex-OPA head, ex-Senator, hung out his lawyer's shingle in Detroit, thus apparently bowed out of politics for a while. Michigan Democrats had been speculating on his gubernatorial chances.
Orson Welles, chairman of something called the action committee of the Free World Association, warned a Detroit audience against the rise of a new U.S. Fascist whom he visualized as a man "with the charm of Will Rogers--a little like Abraham Lincoln, but an ex-football player."
Minimizers
Noel Coward, visiting Manhattan on his way to entertain South African military hospitals, was asked about a rumor of his engagement to Marina, Britain's beauteous, widowed Duchess of Kent (who was down with flu last week, like many of her countrymen--see p. 44). In clipped syllables he clipped the rumor: "Utterly idiotic."
Emily Hahn, rash, black-haired, late-jazz-age authoress (Seductio ad Absurdum) who became Shanghai's favorite ex-New Yorker, deplored the lack of Occidental gossip. Back in the U.S. (via the Gripsholm) for the first time in nine years, the onetime "China Coast Correspondent" of The New Yorker sighed for the Oriental candor she had left behind: "When I talk to my friends, on the phone say, about some man who divorced his wife to run off with her daughter by a former marriage, they say: 'sh-sh, you're back in New York, you know.' " Long-famed as an uninhibited collector of 1) the first engineering degree given a woman by the University of Wisconsin, 2) monkeys, 3) the lowdown, 4) U.S.-banked royalties on her best-selling The Soong Sisters, 5) Manila cigar ashes, Miss Hahn introduced a reporter to the most unconventional item in her Oriental collection: her two-year-old, Chinese-babbling daughter Carola.
Moss Hart, gold-plated author of Winged Victory (TIME, Nov. 29), was suddenly short of gold. Stolen from his apartment was his entire collection of high-carat garters, cuff links, suspenders, cigaret cases, pens & pencils.
Sisley Huddleston, longtime European correspondent, onetime London Times's and Christian Science Monitor's goateed political commentator, now an ardent Vichyite settled in Normandy, got some of Vichy's paper stock for a book belittling democracy (The Myth of Liberty).
Irvin Cobb, ill (pneumonia) in Manhattan, deplored admirers who sent him regrets about his "dangerous illness" by wire (collect) or phone (charges reversed).
78 at 81
Amos Alonzo Stagg, silver-haired, 81-year-old coach at the College of the Pacific, got 78% of the votes cast by the Football Writers' Association for the game's "man of the year." His Navy trainees had polished off all but two of their nine tough opponents. At the same time (20-odd years after his team-producing heyday at the University of Chicago), 128 coaches on a New York World-Telegram panel hailed him as their outstanding colleague of 1943.
*A Marine's letter quoted by Walter Winchell reported that Vanderbilt had 35 pictures of K. T. pinned up in his boat, had lost about 20 lb., was jaundiced, had "an anemic little beard, but the courage of a lion . . . cool, daring and deadly."
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