Homing Pigeons

Doris Duke ("Richest-Girl-in-the-World") Cromwell, after five years of Spartan wartime exile, was back in Shangri-La, her marble-&-granite palace off Honolulu's Diamond Head. The short-time Hearst correspondent (she sent some earnest stories from Rome) flew in with eleven pieces of baggage and a couple of house guests, settled down among her waterfalls and fountains for a long rest. Had she plans for a future in journalism? Her considered reply: "Newspaper work is interesting."

Mrs. Harrison ("Best-Dressed") Williams was back in Capri after long exile in Manhattan and Palm Beach. The tireless, chin-up hostess and amateur flower gardener flew across, picked up her old chauffeur in Paris en route. Soon word came back to the New York World-Telegram's society editor that "Mona" was "seen daily being driven through the streets of Capri in first one, then another of her long, sleek and luxurious limousines."

Family Men

Major Arthur W. ("One-Man Army") Wermuth was all set to marry a lady parachute-jumper as soon as his wife got her divorce; he had a farm and filling station in Hill City, S.D. Said he: "I'm going to raise horses, cattle, and kids."

Elizabeth ("The Red Network") Dilling's son, Kirkpatrick, sued his ex-mother-in-law for alienation of affections, two years after his wife divorced him. Mrs. Reid Bronson, the ex-mother-in-law, retorted that Dilling had "lured" her daughter by "claiming he was heir to ... $100,000 . . . and would take her to ... a Swiss chalet." Mother Dilling managed to get into the act. Said she: "It's all a New Deal smear."

Alfonso Gonzalez Pardo, great-grandson of ex-President Manuel Pardo of Peru, spent a night in a Manhattan jail for lack, purely momentary, of $50,000 bail. Wife Ann, an ex-Powers model suing him for $4,000-a-month alimony, had him arrested just to keep him on the scene. He had already sent about $600,000 home to Peru, she charged, and she was afraid he was going there himself. Said he: "I have no immediate plans, so I will stay here a while."

Earl Moran, 53, top-ranking painter of pretty-girl calendars, made answer to his wife's divorce charge that he had gone off to a convention in St. Paul with much-publicized Polka-Dot-Girl Chili Williams. Said he: he had invited his wife, but she wouldn't go.

Oldsters

Bernard Baruch's friends handed him a 76th birthday present which everybody earnestly hoped would look just as jolly to the world a decade hence. It was a playful Derso-&-Kelen cartoon of Baruch and fellow delegates to the Atomic Energy Commission, all dressed up like Dumas' jolly musketeers.*

Dr. Frank Buchman, sexagenarian Oxford Group leader who returned to England last spring after seven years' absence, was now reported sitting on an Alp. The perch: Switzerland's sky-high Caux. The shelter: a former luxury hotel. Buchmanites had bought it and were aswarm there for a big postwar drive. Reported one of them happily: "The people of the neighborhood seem pleased. . . ."

Best Sellers

Ernest Hemingway had to stop off at Casper, Wyo., on a vacation trip to Idaho, while 4th Wife Mary underwent an emergency operation, but he still hoped to get in some fishing with his three sons by Wives No. 1 and 2. Afterwards he would finish a new novel, but "I can't talk about the book; I never do when I am working on one."

Frederic (The Hucksters) Wakeman, caught with his manse down in the housing shortage, gave up house-hunting in the U.S. and moved to Bermuda. Wakeman, who wrote his best-seller in a month, had three new novels idling around in his head. "I plan to write one of them in October," said he.

Objectors

Shirley Temple taking a snort in her next picture was too much for W.C.T.U. President Mrs. D. Leigh Colvin to bear; she protested to the studio that youth everywhere might be inspired to do likewise. But the studio set her at ease; the drink would be something unthinkable--Scotch and bourbon mixed--and Shirley would spit it out in horror.

Jascha Heifefz and the Hollywood Bowl had words. The Bowl management made public covert cracks about "certain artists" wanting a lot of money and then deciding not to play. Heifetz promptly fielded the innuendo. The Bowl, said he to the public, had begged him to play, and he had agreed to for $5,000, and then the Bowl itself had called it off. Well, sure, said the Bowl--Heifetz had promised not to tell how much he was being paid, and then he went and told. Now everybody was getting expensive ideas. "Such things as artistic interests," intoned Heifetz, "are above monetary considerations."

Thomas Hart Benton had words with himself. One of ten artists commissioned by a department-store chain to do some paintings, he walked out because he disapproved of some of the painters. Men he approved had been dropped, complained Benton, and "slick-paper names like my own were put in their place."

Lily Pons could take the high notes but she couldn't take the altitude, so she abruptly canceled two dates with the National Opera in mile-and-a-half-high Mexico City. Rumored differences with a baritone, said the Opera management, had nothing to do with it. Pons got her wind back, showed up in time to sing Lucia in the season's very last performance.

Scorchers

George White, 53, had seen better days. In San Diego, the onetime millionaire producer of high-priced Broadway revues (the Scandals) got a one-year prison term and $600 fine for hit-&-run driving. He had been asleep at the wheel, he said, when his car killed a honeymoon couple a month ago. The fine was paid by an exmarine, who said he was doing it because the showman had sent him parcels in a Jap prison camp. White said his own bankroll was only $180.

Jean Tennyson, blonde star of radio's late Great Moments in Music (and wife of the sponsor's president, Camille Dreyfus of Celanese Corp. of America), had a frightening moment in a friend's car. The door swung open and the singer, riding with the friend's 18-month-old son on her lap, landed in the street. Plump Soprano Tennyson got a bunged-up face; the baby landed unharmed.

"Slapsie" Maxie Rosenbloom, ex-light-heavyweight champion turned actor, paid $10 in Chicago for speeding, but he felt put upon. "Everything was going O.K. until the cop found out who I was," he complained. "Then he took advantage of my stupidity."

* Ferdinand Eberstadt, Herbert Bayard Swope, John Hancock, Fred Searles, Jr., Baruch.

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