Harlem's "400,'' dressed fit to kill, sashayed into Harlem's Renaissance Ballroom to acclaim its No. 1 debutante, lissome, chicory-colored. 18-year-old Wezlynn Margaret Develle Tildon. Swathed in demure Victorian mousseline de soie, Debutante Tildon stood in a receiving line beside her mother, who drawled: "There has never been a daughter in our immediate family who was not properly presented to society."

Off to her villa in Cannes for a rest from the fatigue of lecturing, writing and putting on other people's parties, self-made, avoirdupoised Socialite Elsa Maxwell sniffed: "I never go to night clubs. . . . You are compelled to rub shoulders with people you do not want to know."

Chattered Eleanor Roosevelt in her syndicated Scripps-Howard column: "Someone sent me a wonderful clip to wear on my nose while swimming. ... I find, however, it is going to require some little time before I can breathe with ease through my mouth alone."

In Manhattan last week, on their way from London to Hollywood (he to play Quasimodo, she probably Esmeralda, in RKO's revival of The Hunchback of Notre Dame), were heavy-lidded, heavy-lipped Actor Charles Laughton and his 18-year-old protegee, picture-pretty, red-headed Dubliner Maureen O'Hara. While she grinned, postured, made egg-big eyes for cameramen, he admitted: "The truth is that I'm an incurable ham."

An Edinburgh court refused to deal with the divorce suit of the U. S.-born Duchess of Leinster. Reason: her husband, Edward Fitz-Gerald, Premier Duke, Marquess & Earl of Ireland, was not domiciled in Scotland. To prove it the court quoted from his earlier declaration: "My departure from Scotland has been really to suit my wife. She one said she could not live with blackfaced sheep and lochs and I saw a certain amount of truth in that."

In swank, fox-hunting Warrenton, Va., Washington Society Columnist Count Igor Cassini (grandson of the late Tsarist Ambassador to the U. S. Count Arthur Cassini) was lured from a country-club dance, tarred & feathered by five aristobrats. Arrested next day were Ian and Colin Montgomery, Alexander Calvert. Reported the Count: "I recognized Ian Montgomery and asked him, 'Why are you doing this to me?' He said I had written in my column that his mother was invited to the reception for the King and Queen of England and that his father had not been invited."

Tickled pink was London's 81-year-old Lord Bishop Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram, when he won his match (against 68-year-old Sir John Hammerton) in the annual Church v. Press golf tourney, was presented with an initialed golf bag. Bishop Ingram rose to the occasion, drove straight, kept out of bunkers, where he uses "the most awful language."

Amid parliamentary palaver on a proposed tobacco-tax increase, waspish Lady Nancy Astor, M. P., who abominates smoking & drinking, called smoking "almost a national crime." Said a fellow member: "Is this not rather strange talk coming from a daughter of Virginia?" Retorted Lady Astor: "I remember the Bishop of Virginia telling me 30 years ago he would sooner see his daughter drunk than smoking a cigarette."

Some 30 years ago sleek, bandboxical "Dapper Don" Collins began looting telephone boxes, soon graduated to blackmail, stock swindles, fraud, rumrunning. By the garish '20s he had a yacht, rolls of thousand-dollar bills, a long police record, a beauteous consort (Helen Patterson Heywood, who divorced her husband for him). Last week, friendless, feeble, finished, 59-year-old Dapper Don went to Sing Sing to serve 15 to 30 years. His crime: a piddling swindle. Said he: "I've been around, but today I'm just an old reprobate."

Kudosed last week: Eduard Benes, Czecho-Slovakia's former President, who has lectured on democracy at University of Chicago since last February (honorary degrees from Princeton, Yale); Poet Archibald MacLeish, newly appointed Librarian of Congress (Doctor of Letters, Yale); U. S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (Doctor of Civil Law, Oxford), who was saluted with a Latin pun: Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas (Happy indeed is he who can understand legal arguments).

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