Monday, Mar. 13, 1939

To ensure her Danish divorce going through next year without further fuss, Countess Barbara Hutton Haugwitz-Reventlow finally agreed in Great Britain's High Court of Justice to give her husband, Count Court, "custody, care and superintendence" of their 2 1/2year-old son, Lance until he is 21. Countess Babs will entertain her son on periodic visits. The rest of the time, she will have her $40,000,000.

When Count Ludwig Constantin Salm of Austria married Standard Oil Heiress Millicent Rogers in 1924, he was so broke that she had to buy the wedding ring. Last week, still broke and now divorced, he filed a petition in New York Supreme Court to have their 14-year-old son, Peter Salm, support him ($20,000 a year for himself, $10,000 a year for the expense of having his son visit, $35,000 for counsel fees). Reason: "It is the duty of a child possessing wealth to support a parent without funds."

At a World's Fair luncheon for visiting mayors in Manhattan Amos 'n' Andy (Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll) broadcast an extracurricular skit. Amos: "De emblem o' de fair is really bee-yutiful. Dat tall tower reminds me of de Washin'ton monument; an' dat big ball reminds me. . . ." Andy: ". . . of Jim Farley's haid." They were followed by New York City's little Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who assumed an accent and ad-libbed: (As Amos) "No mail today. ... I knew you should'n'a made dat crack about Jim Farley." (As Andy) "I thought dat was a pretty good gag." (As Amos) "Yes, but didn' you know de perisphere was empty?"

Last December, a car driven by scholarly, Nazi-hating William Edward Dodd, former U. S. Ambassador to Germany, hit four-year-old Negro Glois Grimes near Hanover Courthouse, Va. Dr. Dodd, arrested on a hit-&-run charge, pleaded not guilty. On trial last week, he changed his plea, threw himself on the mercy of the court. His daughter, Martha Dodd Stern, testified that he had declined mentally and physically since the death of his wife last spring. His lawyer said that he had already paid over $1,100 in hospital and doctors' bills to Glois Grimes's parents. The judge, who might have sent tired old Dr. Dodd to jail, fined him $250 and costs.

When Pope Pius XII (see p. 36), then Cardinal Pacelli, visited the U. S. in 1936, he was flown over 4,000 miles in a chartered plane, piloted by Captain Jack O'Brien. Last week Pilot O'Brien reminisced: "Everywhere we flew those three days and four nights, north, east or south or west, we were favored with tail winds and clear weather, and just as soon as we went through, the weather behind us closed in and conditions were unflyable. . . . I decided to catch up on my religion."

When Frank Hague Jr., who was never graduated from law school, was nominated, to please his Jersey City boss father, as a lay judge on New Jersey's Court of Errors & Appeals (TIME, March 6), 68-year-old Inventor Samuel W. Rushmore was disgusted. Because words failed him, he ordered the 1,250 trees on his Plainfield, N. J. estate chopped down, planned to tear down his two-story house "brick by brick," erect a $220,000 maternity hospital for Negroes on its site, and leave the State forever.

How John Jacob Astor, a fat young man with a fat income and no job, was entitled to deduct $5,163 for "business expenses" on his income-tax return was something the Government did not understand. His explanation: "The collection of income is the business conducted by the petitioner . . . and the expenses of such trade or business are proper deductions from the petitioner's income." The Government's answer: Pay up.

When Cinemactress Katharine Hepburn drove past him near Wilmington, Del., State Trooper Joseph Shannon stopped her "because she looked too young to drive a car." Later he declared: "I soon found out she was not a kid. She was a regular little wildcat. She shrieked . . . and generally acted like a bunch of wildfire."

The Federal Trade Commission issued cease-&-desist papers against Angelo Siciliano (naked name: Charles Atlas), mailorder musclebuilder. Their orders: that he stop using the word "free" in connection with a ten-volume Sex Encyclopedia offer (customers get them after they have paid up all of a $20 fee for lessons), stop stating that his course relieves skin diseases and constipation, tone down his claims that he can make his customers look something like himself ("World's Most Perfectly Developed Man" in a leopardskin loincloth). Hopping mad, Strongman Atlas gritted: "Why don't they leave me alone with all the important work I got to do in the world? I really think I'm doing the cleanest work of any man livin' today."

To the U. S. came news that after a year and a half of marriage to his American-born Duchess, the Duke of Windsor now calls a dinner jacket a "tux," a wireless a "radio," occasionally emits the word "cute." But he still says "we" when he means himself, still insists that all their friends refer to his wife as "Her Royal Highness." (Their proposed visit to England in March has been indefinitely postponed because of the dispute over her title.) The Duchess he addresses as "My Darling," sometimes "Sweet."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.