Facts and Figures

Facts and Figures King Gustaf of Sweden skidded and crashed in his bathtub, took a header, bruised himself badly enough to have to walk with a cane.

Princess Christine, granddaughter of Gustaf, had her picture taken while vacationing at seaside Falsterbo, looked as if she had just stepped out of a bath.

Joseph Stalin's face appeared in Portuguese newspapers for the first time in 20 years. The Salazar dictatorship dropped its ban, and every morning paper in Lisbon blossomed with a picture.

Margie Hart, red-haired stripteaser, was too hot for the U.S.O. to handle. "The Poor Man's Garbo," who had once been forbidden by New York University to lecture on farming, told Stars & Stripes that the U.S.O. not only wanted none of her wiggle-waggling for troops overseas, but declined her strictly subdued offer to wrap herself up in a Mother Hubbard and give poetry recitations.

Words and Music

Harry S. Truman, as the nation's leader in victory, was invited to play the piano for posterity. Herbert Wells Fay, custodian of Lincoln's tomb, serving in his sideline capacity as head of a society to preserve the little ways of the great, suggested that the President make a recording, wrote to him: "What could be more fitting. . . . Never in the past has a U.S. Chief Executive possessed such a marked talent. . . ."

Leo ("Lippy") Durocher, normally eloquent manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, made personal history of a sort when he was bound over to a grand jury on a charge of beating up a heckler. Through the entire court proceedings Lippy uttered not a word.

"Tokyo Rose" (who actually calls herself "Annie, your favorite enemy") won a silly-season citation from the U.S. Navy for "meritorious achievement." The grounds: that she had "inspired [U.S. fighters] to a greater determination than ever to get the war over quickly. .. ."

Major Richard I. Bong's 21-year-old widow, Marjorie, announced that she had started writing a biography of the ace of aces a month before his death (without telling him) and would now settle down to finishing it, in Hollywood.

General Joseph Stilwell, asked by some visiting publishers on Okinawa what he thought the average G.I.'s war aims were, obliged by writing an (813-word) imaginary dialogue between a "Highbrow and a G.I." Asked about "the ideology behind the action," the G.I. responds: "The war started, and we got drafted, and here we are." Pressed further, General Joe's G.I. tells the Highbrow off: "You are looking for something so natural that nobody thinks of naming it."

Vaslav Nijinsky, lithe, high-leaping ballet great of 30 years ago, reported slain as a madman by the Nazis last May, turned out to be living in a bomb-blasted Vienna hotel. His wife Romola told reporters that he had almost regained his reason when he left a Swiss asylum in 1940, but life in air-raided Europe had set him back again. At 55 he looked 70: his cheeks were sunken from a near-starvation diet (he lost 40 pounds in the past four months). A reporter could hold his attention only by drawing him doodles. Yet, though he had not danced in public for about 25 years, he did a dance for soldiers at a Red Army campfire some weeks before. "They even made him drunk," said his wife, "which was naughty of them."

Exits and Entrances

Colonel James Roosevelt was retired from the Marines after nearly five years' service. Cause: recurrent stomach trouble.

Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, 54-year-old philosopher and British Information-Pleaser, whose photogenic satyr-beard has long been familiar to British newspaper readers, displayed a little-known side of himself to the public. Occasion: a swimming party at a new youth hostel, which Philosopher Joad ceremoniously opened after an august arrival on horseback.

Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, who went to London in 1943 for a four-month run of There Shall Be No Night (which stretched out to a year and a half), finally came home--with plans for bringing their new Love in Idleness to Broadway as Oh, Mistress Mine. Having just made a U.S.O. tour of western Europe, Actor Lunt declared: "It's going to be very difficult to play before common people--that is, civilians--again."

Deanna Durbin, 22-year-old baby-faced cinema songbird, told the waiting world that she was going to have a baby next March.

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