Born. To Edda, Countess Ciano, daughter of Benito Mussolini, and Count Galeazzo Ciano, head of the Fascist press bureau (see col. 1), sometime Italian Minister to China: a daughter, their second child; in Rome. Grandfather Mussolini jubilantly canceled the day's engagements, rushed to his daughter's side.

Born. To Princess Ileana of Rumania, sister of King Carol, and Archduke Anton von Habsburg: a daughter, their second child; on the Archduke's estate near Vienna. Name: Maria Ileana.

Engaged, John Jacob Astor, 21, great-great-grandson of the first John Jacob Astor, younger son of the fourth John Jacob Astor (Titanic victim) and of Madeleine Talmadge Force Astor Dick Fiermonte; and Eileen S. S. Gillespie. Manhattan debutante. Heir to $3,000,000 last August when he reached his majority, young John Jacob three weeks ago became the stepson of his onetime boxing instructor (TIME, Dec. 4).

Engaged. Herbert Edwin Hawkes, 61, Ph. D., mathematician, dean of Columbia College since 1918; and Anna L. Rose, 40, Ph. D., Carnegie Foundation researcher; onetime (1921-29) dean and registrar of George Washington University.

Married. Athos Terzani, 31, Manhattan taxi driver and antiFascist; and one Tillie Golia; in Irving Plaza Hall, Manhattan. Best man: Norman Thomas, No. 1 U. S. Socialist. Wedding guests: some 600 Socialists, Communists, anarchists, syndicalists, antiFascists. Day before Terzani had been acquitted of fatally shooting a friend at a riotous meeting of the Khaki Shirts of America (Fascist) last July.

Married. Gary Cooper, 32, film actor, son of a Helena, Mont, jurist; and Veronica Balfe (Sandra Shaw), 20, film actress, of Manhattan; in Manhattan.

Married. James Alexander ("Jim") Reed, 72, longtime (1911-29) U. S. Senator from Missouri; and Mrs. Nell Quinlan Donnelly, 43, wealthy garment manufacturer. Two years ago Senator Reed helped rescue his bride from kidnappers. Cried he then: "If a single hair of Mrs. Donnelly's head is harmed, I'll devote the rest of my life to catching the kidnappers." Her rise to fame began 26 years ago with experiments in selling a type of housedress ("Nelly Don") of her own design. Ever since Mrs. Reed died last year and Mrs. Donnelly divorced her husband a month later, Missourians have expected their political hero someday to marry their most famed business woman.

Died. Richard John ("Rich") Glendon Jr., 38, Columbia University's crew coach since 1926. son of the Naval Academy's famed retired crew coach; of a shotgun wound, declared accidental by a medical examiner; while duck shooting near Chatham, Mass.

Died. Louis Joseph Vance, 54, fictionist (The Lone Wolf, The Brass Bowl, The Road to EnDor, The Trembling Flame, two score more), bridge player; mysteriously; in his Manhattan apartment where he lived alone. His body was found on the floor with head and shoulders, badly burned, resting on a blazing armchair. Friends said he was a constant and careless smoker, burned holes in pajamas, dressing gowns, bedcovers. An autopsy revealed that he was intoxicated when he died. Like the late Robert W. Chambers (see below), Author Vance was a onetime artist, a prodigiously prolific writer, a scorner of "literature."

Died. William Sloane Coffin, 54, Manhattan realty & furniture man (W. & J. Sloane), president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1931, brother of Union Theological Seminary's President Henry Sloane Coffin; of a heart attack; in Manhattan.

Died. Count Ilya Tolstoy, 67, second son of the late great Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, lecturer, author (Visions, Reminiscences of My Father); of heart and gall-bladder disorders; in New Haven, Conn. After the 1917 revolution he returned to Russia from a U. S. lecture tour, was driven out again by Bolsheviks. With his wife, a Russian emigree whom he married in 1920 in Newark, he lived in the Connecticut hills, tilled his own soil. In 1926 he helped with the screen adaptation of his father's Resurrection, played in it the part of the cobbler-philosopher.

Died. Robert William Chambers, 68, novelist, painter, angler, hunter, collector of butterflies, armor and Japanese art; after an intestinal operation; in Manhattan. Son of a Brooklyn jurist, he studied art in Paris, drew sketches for Life, Vogue, began to write. Critics, impressed by The King in Yellow, his second book, were disappointed when he began turning out two perfumed and aseptic romances a year. (Total production: 60 novels.) "Literature! The word makes me sick!" he snorted. His painstaking historical research was largely lost on his millions of readers (Ashes of Empire, Cardigan). He was the first U. S. author to sell story rights to the cinema.

Died. Theodore Moses Tobani, 78, composer of "Hearts and Flowers" and of 5,479 other pieces; of a stroke; in Queens, N. Y. "Hearts and Flowers," of which 23,000,000 copies have been sold since 1893, won him so much attention from fledgling composers that he moved from Manhattan to Queens, put "real estate" after his name in the telephone book.

Died. Peter Wiltberger Meldrim. 85, presiding judge of Georgia's Eastern Judicial Circuit, onetime (1914) president of the American Bar Association, onetime (1897-99) mayor of Savannah; in Savannah. After the Civil War in which he, 16, sniped at Sherman's troops on their way to the sea, he studied and practiced law, became a power in Georgia politics.

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