Nods

Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, heretofore a commoner with a courtesy title (because brother George was a Marquess), became a lord in his own right. George VI made him a viscount on his birthday honors list.

Sir William Beveridge, 67-year-old security planner, was one of seven new barons.

The Earl of Halifax became one of the select company (limited to 24 living persons) awarded the Order of Merit.

Clementine Churchill, wife of Winston, became Dame Clementine--a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, for her Russian relief fundraising.

Marjorie Bertha Morgenstierne, daughter of Norwegian Ambassador Wilhelm, was awarded a title that seemed almost too much for one young girl to shoulder. Judges at a beauty contest in Washington picked her as Miss United Nations of 1946.

Leo McCarey, Hollywood producer-director (Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary's), was top man on the year's first U.S. Treasury list of the best-paid people. His take: $1,113,035. (Federal income tax on that much income: about 89%).

Time's Winged Chariot

William S. Hart, steely-eyed hero of Hollywood's primordial westerns, was in danger--"likely to be deceived and imposed upon by artful and designing persons," declared an old friend, Francis Gudger. Gudger asked a Los Angeles court to appoint himself and another friend as the lantern-jawed, two-gunman's lawful guardians. William S. Hart Jr. begged to differ; he (and a bank) should get the guardian assignment. While the legalistic bullets whined and sang, the old hero, who admits to 70-odd and is worth about $1,000,000, lay beyond the battle, gravely ill in a Los Angeles hospital.

Sir Malcolm Campbell, veteran auto-&-boat speedster, had a new ambition at 61. He proposed to raise the water speed record (141.74 m.p.h.) which he set with the Bluebird II in 1939. On an English lake next fall he will use the Bluebird's old hull with a brand-new jet engine.

Alvin York, World War I hero, drilled again, this time for oil, and struck it a few miles from his home in Tennessee's Cumberland Mountains. He said that he was getting 13 barrels an hour; the state geologist said that the well would not make Hero York a millionaire, but he might become "materially wealthier."

Heinrich Himmler, who in life looked like a cross between a wasp and a pig, looked different in death. His death mask (see cut), taken near Lueneburg, Germany, after his suicide (by swallowing potassium cyanide), might have been mistaken for that of a daft and drunken Silenus.

Disenchantments

Robert Donat, currently starred in Vacation from Marriage, was sued for divorce in London by Wife Ella after 17 years, three children.

Martha Scott went to Las Vegas, Nev. to divorce her husband, Radio Announcer Carlton Alsop (no kin to Columnists Joseph & Stewart Alsop).

Richard Joshua Reynolds, multimillionaire tobacco heir, settled Wife Elizabeth's suit for separate maintenance: she got custody of their four children and enough to live on. The amount was kept secret, but she had figured she needed $100,000 a year.

Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt herself--dowager head of the Vanderbilts, portly queen of Manhattan society from way back, and now pushing 80--blossomed in the gossip columns as a heartthrob item. There had been nothing so sensational since she took to wearing hats after years of allegiance to a "headache band."

Hearstlings Walter Winchell and Cholly Knickerbocker broke the news: "Her Grace" was about to remarry. The supposed groom-to-be: Charles Andrews Munroe, 71, retired midwest utilitycoon and international-setter. Almost immediately the item withered. Mrs. Vanderbilt and Son Cornelius Jr., quoted by the World-Telegram: ". . . too silly for words." Mrs. Vanderbilt, quoted by Post Columnist Earl Wilson: "It's all nonsense!" Mrs. Morin Hare, supposed matron-of-honor-to-be, to reporters: "It's fantastic . . . ridiculous . . . an outrage . . ." Mrs. Hare added: "We're taking her up to Newport."

Knickerbocker's last words: "Whether the marriage will actually occur must remain a matter of speculation for a few months. . . ." Winchell just let it lie.

The Facts

llya Ehrenburg, Russian journalist (but a deplorer, he says, of censorship) who has been trying on the U.S. for size, turned his professional attention to Canada, discovered the same deplorable state of affairs there. "In two days in Canada," he reported in Toronto, "I have seen the good and the bad--the good is your people, and bad are your newspaper articles."

Norman Corwin, jack-of-all-radio, paused to set a few minds at ease as he flew off on a four-month round-the-world tour patterned on Wendell Willkie's 1942 flight. "Storm" indications between the U.S., Britain, and Russia, he announced, were "nothing serious." Armed with a recording device and set for interviews high & low, the winner of the "OneWorld" award (TIME, March 4) proposed to turn his trip to account by capturing "the ordinary qualities" of practically all kinds of people all over the world.

Robert Burns got a backhanded tribute on the 150th anniversary of his death. In Manhattan the Rev. Charles S. Webster saw fit to say that the Scottish poet was not the irreligious tosspot he had been made out. Burns was really, said Pastor Webster, the Frank Sinatra of his day.

Howard Lindsay, co-dramatizer of Life with Father, made a touching contribution to a New York Times symposium of filial memories on Father's Day. "Mother spent ten years trying to get the truth out of Father," recalled Lindsay, "then gave up and left him."

Collector's Items

Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, off to Paris, left behind a collector's item in the field of doodlery. Retrieved from his place at a Washington committee meeting was a matchless example of the rose-o window work of the painstaking blastula school, with the later or packing-box influences of neo-cubism only just becoming apparent (see cut).

Congressman Augustus W. Bennett of New York, back from Washington with his wife & three children, lacked the heart to evict the tenants to whom he had sublet, instead moved in with a friend. The hardship was endurable: in Utilitycoon John Wilkie's home, the Bennetts got "eleven or twelve" spare rooms.

Congressman Roy Orchard Woodruff, septuagenarian Michigander, hustled into the House, demanded a roll call; bells rang far & wide, and absent statesmen came out of their hideaways. Woodruff went out to the lobby and, sure enough, his missing straw hat, brand-new, was back on its hook.

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