Her Ladyship

Lady Astor, 66, walked down a tiny fruit steamer's gangplank into a stage-idol's welcome in Manhattan, gave swarming reporters and cameramen a performance to remember. Wrapped in mink and hung with diamond-&-sapphire earrings, she got For She's a Jolly Good Fellow from the ship's crewmen, cried back happily, "What more could a girl ask?" and faced the press. "I'm an extinct volcano," said she, but soon became active.

The Virginia-born Viscountess, 25 years an M.P., was home for a two-months' visit. The passage had been rough, the ship six days late, and for ten days, said Lady Astor, she "read the Bible steadily . . . gives you the proper perspective."

A reporter brought up the Labor Government. "What Labor Government," snapped the Conservative Viscountess. "Why, England is still full of lords and ladies!"

Other Astorisms:

P:On international relations: "I'm not asking England and America to like each other, but they must work together."

P:On the "common man": "It isn't the 'common man' at all who is important; it's the uncommon man."

P:On her future plans: "I may run for Congress--what do you think of that?"

Once afoul of British ration laws for trying to get a fur coat from the U.S., she thought she might bag one this trip, "if I have any gentlemen friends." Newsreel men handed her a canned speech to read. "That's the worst speech I ever heard," said she. Cameramen took closeups. "We never did this to Mrs. Roosevelt," the Viscountess protested. "No other country in the world behaves like America!" At interview's end she moved off, cried loudly as she departed, laughing: "Goodbye, you horrors--you horrors!"

Domestic Relations

Hedy Lamarr was "terribly hurt." Her third husband, Actor John Loder, had walked out on her two weeks before and she hadn't seen him since. Said she: "We had a quarrel." Overshadowed Actor Loder had been terribly hurt, too, reported Gossipist Hedda Hopper. She figured that the beginning of the end was when he failed to bag a leading role in famed Wife Hedy's latest picture.

Edgar Bergen, no dummy, got another marriage license seven months after he wed Model Frances Westerman in Mexico, got set for a full-fashioned church wedding in California to make his mother-in-law happy.

Emanuel List, Metropolitan Opera basso, was labeled "dictatorial, insulting, penurious and cruel" by Wife Anny in a Manhattan court. She won a separation and $300-a-month support. The judge decided that the basso had abandoned her, even though the Lists did live in the same suite: a partition was between them, and List hadn't spoken to her since September, 1944.

New Twists

Sally Rand said she would open a San Francisco nightclub with a revolutionary new twist: "There won't be any girls coming around peddling flowers and cigarets and pictures and peanuts."

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose name had just been given to a mountain in Canada (TIME, Jan. 21), was presented with the chance of a conversationalist's lifetime by Senator Edwin C. Johnson, who told him Colorado hoped to honor him the same way. "You have Pikes Peak now," said the General, fielding the opportunity one-handed, "and you want Ike's Peak?"

Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, away three and a half years from editing Manhattan's pinko tabloid PM, cast a returned-war-veteran's eye on his strike-stricken homeland, bubbled happily in his first editorial: "Everybody else seems terribly upset . . . and I discover I feel fine about it."' Reason for feeling fine: 1) the auto strikers' solidarity; 2) the "exciting new note of unity" in the telephone and wire strikes; 3) the lack of complacency among industrialists; 4) the homesick G.I.s' "refusal ... to be content with the malarkey." Summed up happy Veteran Ingersoll: "I am sorry if I am out of step, but all this 'unrest' feels good to me."

Old Hands

Gertrude Stein wanted to help Americans understand the French better, so she wrote a new play: Yes Is for a Very Young Man. The young man who is yes very young goes into four acts which is not the same no not the same as Four Saints in Three Acts. She hoped that it would hit Broadway after it played Pasadena next March. "I think this play is very interesting," said Playwright Stein in Paris: it had a quarrel in every act, and "a love element . . . the young man . . . had a tendresse for his brother's wife, which is often the case in France, you know. . . ."

Erich Maria Remarque confessed, after 17 years, that he had not planned All Quiet on the Western Front as an "antiwar book." Said he: "I was simply interested in portraying the reaction of youth facing death." To writer Remarque the really effective anti-war book would be a picture-book. Nevertheless he was still writing, was following up a new novel (see BOOKS) with yet another, about German crimes and German mistakes. "The human mind forgets too quickly," explained between-the-wars best-seller Remarque. "The simple fact that a man has survived the war . . . makes him, after a short time, remember war as a grand adventure."

Post-Mortems

Dr. Robert Ley's heart and mind were further opened to the public gaze: 1) in Berlin, where his will was read; 2) in Washington, where the results of a postmortem on the suicide's brain were announced. The bibulous Nazi labor leader's will paid dithery tribute to "the beautiful women who have embellished my life so much," Inga (wife) and Madeleine Wanderer (mistress). U.S. Army pathologists, who have had the Ley brain since last October (see cut), found that the areas controlling behavior had suffered "a longstanding degenerative process . . . sufficient ... to have impaired Dr. Ley's mental and emotional faculties." Whether it was wine or women, they could not say.

Reporting on a Hollywood party she attended, Diana Barrymore, 24, said that Lawrence (Dillinger) Tierney pasted her cousin, Sammy Colt, 36, so she, Diana, gave Tierney what-for, as he stood there with his shirt off, "like Tarzan." And furthermore, she said: "You dreary, dreadful actor, if you want to fight, hit me." Then she slapped his face eight times. The party, given by Artist John Decker, climaxed in six simultaneous fist fights, but nobody but Jack LaRue lost enough blood to be worth bothering about.

Elie Lescot, suddenly deposed president of French-speaking Haiti, turned up 1) in Miami, 2) in French-speaking Quebec, declared that now he felt quite at home.

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