Love or Money

Clyde Pangborn, famed 'round-the-world flyer of 1931, now an RAFerryman, was sued in Montreal by his wife for $400 a month separate maintenance. Barbara Bennett Downey Randall, sister of Cinemactresses Constance and Joan Bennett, lost her fight for custody of her five children. The Connecticut judge who ruled the children should stay with their father, Crooner Morton Downey, recalled that the mother had remarried a few days after the divorce, found she had "permitted volatile infatuation to be substituted for mother love." Cinecomic Red Skelton's wife Edna announced she was moving out as his wife but would continue as his manager and gagwriter, said: "It had to be one or the other."

Cineproducer Pare Lorentz (The River, The Plow That Broke the Plains) sued RKO for $1,619,147 damages for slander and breach of contract. RKO stopped production last July on his Name, Age and Occupation (25-year odyssey of a "composite American").

Ordered returned by the U.S. to famed World War I Draft Dodger Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, now in the Army pen at Fort Leavenworth: $169,079.71, seized from him in 1921 by the Alien Property Custodian. The money had been held till Bergdoll paid back income taxes of more than $30,000.

In They Go

Lighter in weight, darker in color, trimmer, tougher, younger-looking, Clark Gable graduated as a second lieutenant from the Army Air Forces officer candidate school at Miami, got a secret assignment. Off to the Army at California's

Fort Ord went William Saroyan and

typewriter. His farewell reassurance to reporters: "Don't worry about my career. My career is people." Of his fellow draftees he remarked: "They're all scared," added: "Me, too. But that's what makes a good army. You have to be scared." Cardinal Pitcher Johnny Beazley, 3-A, passed the Navy's physical exam, applied for permission to enlist as a chief specialist in bodybuilding. The draft board of Englewood, NJ. classified Charles Augustus Lindbergh as 3-6 (in vital war work, and with dependents: he has four children).

.... And How They Grew

They left their home for the second time in their lives to make their first appearance in public outside the nursery. They got their first permanent waves, prayed in a big church for the first time, and for the first time saw a zoo. (The parrot called "Good-by.") For the Dionne Quintuplets the week was memorable. The eight-year-olds and their entourage took over 15 rooms in Toronto's King Edward Hotel. They held audiences, raced up & down the halls, were baffled goggle-eyed by a magician, submitted their black, Indian-straight locks to a hairdresser (curls in front, ringlets in back), traffic-jammed the streets outside the hotel and outside the barnlike Maple Leaf Gardens where the Quintuplets bravely put on a special act for the Victory Loan drive. The act was an old-fashioned Hippodrome sock-eroo. In red velveteen dresses, white shoes and socks, the girls rode onstage astride five white tricycles, dismounted, gathered at a mike, sang The Little House in

French, with gestures. Emilie, questioned, piped that she was glad to be there. Yvonne said she remembered meeting the King & Queen there three years before. Then, with grave determination, they all sang There'll Always Be An England in English.

Finale: Emilie marched onstage uniformed as a sailor, Cecile as an airman, Annette as a soldier, Yvonne as a member of the RCAF women's division, Marie as a member of the Women's Army Corps. Backed up by a towering line of Royal Canadian Mounted Police they sang 0 Canada; presently they raised the Union Jack, stood rigidly at attention, and saluted the flag as the curtain rolled down.

Past Masters

Back into the capital of the concert world, Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, for the first time since a truck cracked his skull in the spring of 1941, entered grey-mopped, 67-year-old Fritz Kreisler. With his accustomed dogged melancholy he plunged into his first number; critics aware of his long illness held tight, but presently relaxed. At concert's end Carnegie Hall shouted itself hoarse.

Bald, barrel-chested, bushy-browed Friedrich Schorr announced that this season--his 19th--was his last as the Metropolitan Opera's leading Wagnerian baritone. The 54-year-old "Boss of Valhalla," who has probably played Wotan more times (250) than any other singer, retired to teach.

To an old whisper newly resurrected, Vegetarian George Bernard Shaw made public response. The whisper: he had innocently been eating beef juice in his salad for years. "A very old lie--too stale now to be swallowed," declared the 86-year-old playwright. "I had difficulty preventing two ladies who cooked for me from suing the papers in which it appeared, and it still infuriates my consort."

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