Monday, Oct. 26, 1936

"Names make news." Last week these names made this news:

Unable to sell it for $750, the owners razed the boyhood home near New Hope, N. Y. of Millard Fillmore, 13th and least-appreciated U. S. President.

"Slightly indisposed," Emperor Hirohito of Japan suspended the nation's autumn harvest thanksgiving ritual at which he was expected to offer rice to the Gods of the Imperial Sanctuary.

Listing $700,000 debts and no assets, Edward Fitz-Gerald, Duke of Leinster appeared in London's Bankruptcy Court to tell his creditors how he had embarked in 1928 on a lavish "prospecting" trip to find a U. S. bride who would cure his chronic financial trouble. The impoverished Duke, who once sold stock in himself as "The Dukedom of Leinster Estates, Inc.," said he was twice fooled by "possibilities," finally married Mrs. Rafaelle van Neck of Manhattan, no heiress.

By forcing her to appear at a Manhattan Jefferson Day dinner attended by President Roosevelt, Warner Brothers had violated her $3,000-a-week contract, claimed Cinemactress Bette Davis in a packed London courtroom of the King's Bench Division, where her U. S. employers were suing to stop her from fulfilling a $50,000 British film engagement. "As this contract stands," pleaded her lawyer, "Miss Davis could not become a waitress in a restaurant or an assistant in a hair dresser's shop in the wilds of Africa. . . ." Observed Sir Patrick Hastings, bewigged barrister for Vice President Jack Leonard Warner: "She is a rather naughty young lady who wants more money." Snapped jaunty Bette Davis when the court ruled against her: "A real sock in the teeth!"

By scribbling nights on scratch-pads for two years. Sally Salminen, 30-year-old Finnish maid (employed by a Parkavian family), completed Katrina, a Swedish novel to which Helsingfors publishers awarded a prize of $2,100. "Ever since I can remember I wanted to write," she confessed when cameramen and newshawks arrived in her kitchen. "I was always sort of a crybaby, feeling sad because I didn't have an education."

For her second published novel, The Street of the Fishing Cat, Hungarian Author Jolanda Foldes won the $19,000 All-Nations Prize offered by U. S. & foreign publishers, a cinema corporation.

Brought back alive to a hospital in Amityville, L. I., was Animal Catcher Frank Buck, cut and bruised by a fall from his new Texas pony.

Unharmed in a takeoff from San Antonio's Stinson Field was Publisher Bernarr ("Body Love") Macfadden, campaigning for Governor Landon, when his red cabin plane plowed through two wire fences.

Injured when his automobile upset near Three Rivers, N. Mex., was Cattleman Robert Kleberg Jr., whose famed Santa Gertrudis ranch covers 1,250,000 acres, fronts on the Gulf of Mexico for 80 miles. Before the Society of Motion Picture Engineers at Rochester, N. Y., Board Chairman Merlin Hall Aylesworth of Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corp. demanded higher cinema admission prices, declared: "The wasteful, injurious practice . . . of giving away one Grade A picture with one Grade B picture is like eating too much ice cream at one time." Stricken in Hollywood with bronchial pneumonia lay Cinemactress Norma Shearer, widow of famed Producer Irving Thalberg who died last month of lobar pneumonia (TIME, Sept. 21).

To her Beverly Hills landlady Mrs. Bessie Ginzberg Lasky, wife of Producer Jesse Louis Lasky, was ordered to pay $201 damages inflicted on their house by their 12-year-old son's pet birds, mice, ducks, gopher snakes.

Barred by a doorman from a Cincinnati reception given in her honor by the Girl Scouts of America, Mrs. Herbert Hoover was rescued by an official, re-elected their president.

Celebrating his 70th birthday at London's P.E.N. Club banquet, said H. G. Wells: "I just hate it. I feel like a youngster sitting on the floor with all my games spread out before me. . . . It is as if my nurse were coming to me to say: 'Bertie, it is getting late--time to put those toys away!'"

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