Tributes

Winston Churchill, vacationing at Lake Como, surprised the Milanese by visiting the grave of Mussolini, whom he had often delighted to abuse.*

Pancho Villa, famed Mexican revolutionary of a generation ago, would have been proud to know that Gimbel's Manhattan department store put his pearl-handled six-shooter on sale for $450.

Henri Philippe Petain, under sentence of life imprisonment (commuted from death), was voted by the French Academy to be no longer one of their immortals.

Hot Water

Cab Calloway, Negro jumpleader, landed in court after a tussle with Claude Hopkins, whose band plays at Broadway's Cafe Zanzibar on Cab's night off. Claude appeared in court in a black-&-white-checked suit with bright green necktie, complained that Cab had yanked him off his piano stool and slapped him around "for no reason at all." Cab, also in a black-&-white-checked suit with a red-white-&-blue bow tie, said that Claude had made the first pass. The Man with the Hi-de-Ho was held for assault.

Peter Aitken, 34. auto-racing second son of Lord Beaverbrook (and brother of bemedalled R.A.F. veteran Max Aitken) was fined $42 and given a two months' jail sentence for drunken driving in London.

The Sultan of Johore, bearing a personal grudge against the Jap invaders of his Malayan state--they had not only maltreated his subjects but had swiped five of his automobiles and one of his polo-field rollers--recalled one thoroughly satisfactory incident: Field Marshal Terauchi had made him a present of a loaf of bread, but the Sultan simply smelled it--in the Marshal's presence--and told a manservant to throw it away.

Hearts & Thistles

Walda Eileen Winchell, 18-year-old daughter of Walter, who writes for the Hearst press, was sued for divorce by Boston Art Student William Lawless, 29. The disgruntled bridegroom asked for alimony. (Three days after the marriage last June, Gossip Winchell announced--for his daughter: "We made a mistake. After a heart to heart talk we decided to call it off.")

Emily Hahn, best-selling author (Seductio ad Absurdum, The Soong Sisters), got news in Manhattan about her English friend Major Charles Boxer, whom she described in China to Me as the father of her four-year-old daughter Carola. The ex-Chief of British Military Intelligence in Hong Kong had been found alive and well in a Jap prison camp, said the London Evening News. Said Miss Hahn: "He'll come home and marry me, of course."

Shirley Temple, 17, changed her mind about waiting a few years, decided to marry Sergeant John George Agar right away.

Gloria Swanson, 45, high-styled siren of the silents, complained to a Manhattan court that since her fifth husband had left her she had been living on borrowed money, and now she wanted $1,000-a-week support. William N. Davey, 52, who married her in January and left her in April, charged that she had misrepresented her debts and had failed to tell him before the marriage that she needed an expensive operation, and now he wanted an annulment. Gloria argued Wall Streeter Davey's ability to pay: he kept a $100,000-a-year yacht--and one night, she said, when the swank St. Regis Hotel lacked butter for crepes suzettes he had a half-pound of it brought from home ("War or no war . . . when William Davey wanted crepes suzette he was going to get them and did").

Traveling Men

James H. ("Jimmie") Davis, ballad-singer and tunesmith (You Are My Sunshine), who serenaded the people of Louisiana into electing him governor, went fly-casting (with a bug) in a bayou near Bunkie, hooked and landed an owl.

John L Sullivan,*Assistant Secretary of the Navy (and rumored successor to Secretary Forrestal), lent an influential hand to the rescue of a disabled sloop off the New Hampshire shore. Weekending at Little Boars Head, he reported the craft's plight to the Portsmouth Navy Yard, and a Navy tug towed the sloop ashore.

General Jonathan Wainwright got a brother's, father's, husband's, and hero's welcome home. At San Francisco his sister broke from the airport crowd and gave him a squeeze; Commander Jonathan Jr. wrapped his arms around him, and kissed him on the cheek. In Washington two days later the General stepped from his plane into the arms of his wife, whom he had not seen for more than four years. And President Truman, who remarked that it gave him "more pleasure than almost anything I have ever done," presented him with the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Horsing Around

Admiral William F. Halsey finally rang down the curtain on his vaudeville act about riding the Mikado's white horse: after all, Hirohito's personal belongings were still his. The saddle sent by Reno would go to the U.S. Naval Academy museum, unless Reno wanted it.

General George S. Patton Jr. slipped into the act just at the last moment: the General had his picture taken astride a white horse (see cut) which Hitler had intended to send to the Emperor.

*Some Churchillian epithets: "Whipped jackal . . . tattered lackey . . . merest utensil . . . Italian flop." * No kin to the fame Strong Boy of Boston

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