Must Dress

Diligently elegant Columnist Lucius Beebe and his swirly cape stayed away, 70-year-old Lady Decies turned up without her tiara. Sartorially the opening of the Metropolitan Opera season last week was pretty much of a bust (see p. 74); but generally the bluebloods had done what they could in the face of war--like fiction's Englishmen dressing for dinner in the jungle. Among the attendant owners of rare baubles, rare pelts, rare beauty or simply rare old blood (see cuts): Mrs. Byron Foy (sapphires and diamonds); Mrs. Walter Moving (ermine); Emily Roosevelt (fifth cousin of the President) ; Mrs. John Jacob Astor (of the onetime fur-trapping Astors, pictured furless); Valerie Moore (silver fox); Mrs. Whitney Bourne (kith to the Boston Whitneys); Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney (kin to one from New York); Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh (ermine, a diamond tiara, a diamond & emerald necklace & pendant, diamond earrings, eleven diamond bracelets); Mrs. William Ellerbe (blonde), Nedenia Hutton (blonde, too); Mrs. Harrison Williams (annually on the ten-best-dressed list), who remarked of her gown, chin up: "It's an old dress, but it's French."

Fine Arts

Into Mme. Tussaud's, famed London waxworks, went the parents of the late Air Ace Paddy Finucane to look at their son's image, found it had "not quite caught the look," spoke to the management, which promptly decided a -L-100 remodeling job was in order.

Cinemoralist Will Hays decided an expunging job was in order on Noel Coward's cinebiography of a British destroyer, In Which We Serve--a show London has been enjoying unexpunged for ten weeks now. Producers of the cinema cried protest; both sides were reported marshaling their attorneys for a moral war. In the film are some --* & --/-

Chatty Columnist Elsa Maxwell's amiability crumpled under the strain of Columnist Westbrook Pegler, who, she found, "has taken up the cudgels in defense of women." Gritted Elsa: "Now, Mr. Pegler is a Freudian study ... too much protest is often an unconscious expression of too much love--and vice versa. If this ambivalence of emotion is true--as it seems to be--Westbrook is certainly madly in love with Mrs. Roosevelt. . . . But since Westbrook has turned his loving eye on women, watch out. The Pegler libido . . . turns hot & cold. . . . Personally, girls, I think we had better continue standing on our own two feet."

Superman set out on a swim to Germany, to right the wrong of a generation and ultimately end the crudest comic-strip continuity yet: the Nazis had kidnapped Santa Claus.

War Effort

Out of Harvard for the duration, into the Navy as a body-building lieutenant commander, went portly Richard Cresson ("Dick") Harlow, 53, for the last nine years football coach and curator of oology (birds' eggs).

Into the Marine Corps went Ernest Nelson Chennault, brother of the Flying Tigers' Brigadier General Clair, whose youngest son, Robert Kenneth, 17, went into the Navy last fortnight.

Off on a secret mission "outside the U.S." was Lieut. Commander Walter Winchell.

Zone of Quiet

"Doing nicely" after an emergency appendectomy in a Manhattan hospital: Soprano Jessica Dragonette.

Hospitalized on a tour of U.S. camps in England: Cinemactress Kay Francis (laryngitis); Dancer Mitzi Mayfair (arm & shoulder wrenches from jitterbugging).

*Damns. /- Hells.

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