Fine Feathers

King George VI added color and dash to a tree-planting ceremony at Windsor by appearing in a new Scottish border tweed suit (three-inch redline squares against a light brown background) which cost him some 26 of his annual allotment of 48 clothing coupons. A West End tailor, moodily studying the cloth and cut, predicted that His Majesty's new ensemble would be a fashion setter.

Josephine Baker, toast-colored toast of the prewar Paris stage, who weathered the Nazi occupation (despite one death report) in Morocco, put on a private fashion show to let Paris friends see the too-chichi gowns and hats she will wear on tour with E.N.S.A. (British U.S.O.). Her favorite getup: a "Russian" costume (see cut) featuring a white satin tunic, black velvet trimming, a train.

Lucius Beebe, whose sartorial sharpness is the despair of other Manhattan fancy-dressers, got caught with his spats down in Colorado. Returning from a dusty tour of the Pike's Peak country, he started confidently toward a table in Colorado Springs' swank Broadmoor Hotel, was briskly stopped by the headwaiter. The management's firm attitude: Columnist Beebe, in riding clothes, was not suitably dressed for hotel dining.

Paulina Karpovskaya Zhemchuzhina, wife of Russian Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, acted as a judge at a Moscow fashion show. The no-fuss-&-feathers prizewinners were designs suitable for mass production.

Fuller Explanations

Kathleen Winsor, ornamental author of the sexy bestseller, Forever Amber, denied that her book was in any sense autobiographical: "If it were . . . would I have time to write a book?"

Benito Mussolini, who hoped to model his Fascist state on the Roman Empire, emerged from hiding long enough to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Fascist Party, wearily admitted its decline & fall. The Duce lauded fellow Italians who died for his ideal, politely thanked his Nazi hosts for a good try.

Elsa Maxwell, plump, professional party-planner turned columnist, was tickled when Photographer Leora Thompson assured her that she had an "exuberant"-looking leg. She exulted: "Really, it's not so bad. There may be a lot more of it than necessary, but. . . I don't know-any fat women with legs that can compare with mine."

Mae West, playing the lead in her Catherine Was Great to packed Chicago houses despite the drubbings of a harsh, hostile press, drawled back at her drama-critic detractors: "The way the boys wrote up the show, I'm surprised they weren't raided. And to think I took out the stronger lines . . . on account of Lent!"

Adventure & Travel

Mrs. Winston Churchill packed up for a month's visit to Russian hospitals. Outstanding stop: Rostov-on-the-Don, where her Red Cross Aid to Russia fund will equip two 500-bed hospitals as memorials to united Anglo-Soviet sacrifices.

Gertrude Sanford Legendre (Mrs. Sidney Jennings Legendre), 42, adventure-loving socialite who was the first U.S. woman captured on the western front (last September), escaped from the Germans, fled across the border to Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, still wearing the service uniform in which she worked as interpreter and secretary.

Steve Early, back from an Army mission to Europe, cleaned out the White House desk he has used for twelve years in the hot-corner job as Franklin Roosevelt's press relations secretary, turned it over to Jonathan Daniels, North Carolina newsman and author, son of World War I's Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels. Early will fill in as the Presidential appointment secretary until the late Major General Edwin M. ("Pa") Watson can be replaced. By June 1 he hopes to have a better-paying private job he has still to find ("I'm wide open").

Causes & Complaints

Dorothy Parker, bang-browed verbal bangster, of late more preoccupied with causes than with her famed encaustics, mused: "Committee meetings poison my life. They're mainly lots of people sitting around with their heads in their hands. Then somebody finally says, 'Doesn't any body know Baruch?'"

Mrs. George S. Patton Jr., sick abed with a head cold, asked reporters: "Did my husband have to swim across [the Rhine]?"

Mrs. Harry Bridges, estranged wife of San Francisco's lanky longshoremen's boss (whose deportation as an alien Communist is awaiting U.S. Supreme Court review), demanded $450 a month temporary alimony, pending settlement of their divorce suit. Her plea to the court: she needed that much to support herself "in a style and manner fitting a wife of a prominent union official."

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