The Winner

Miss America 1946, decided the Atlantic City judges after a close study of the innate and acquired talents of 16 vaselike finalists, was that fair-skinned, blue-eyed brunette, the 123-lb. one with the 25 1/2-in. waist, 35 1/2-in. bust, 36-in. hips, 22 1/2-in. thigh, 13 1/2-in. calf, and 8 1/2-in. ankle --that 21-year-old one from California, name of Marilyn Buferd. "Oh my God," said Miss Buferd, "I never expected it." New York Post Columnist Earl Wilson immediately interviewed her. Had she any foibles? "Pardon me," retorted Miss Buferd icily, "I don't understand."

Love among the Artists

Edmund ("Bunny") Wilson, 51-year-old scholar-gypsy of the intelligentsia whose "novel" of suburban sex life (Memoirs of Hecate County) has been a scandalous success, got dug into himself by Manhattan tabloids. Court records showed that he had been successfully sued last March for separation by Wife No. 3: left-wing gypsy authoress Mary McCarthy, whose scandalous storybook, The Company She Keeps, included one called Cruel and Barbarous Treatment. Said she, she had received "abusive treatment" from Critic Wilson, cited the time he had kicked her out of bed. She said she complained the following morning ("I won't stand for this," she cried), and he promptly gave her a black eye. Authoress McCarthy got her alimony award just before Hecate became a profitable bestseller. The award: $60 a week.

Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, most publicized and most meticulous painter of deliquescence and decay, gave his new bride, the late Publisher Joe Patterson's daughter Josephine, a $125,000 present (his own estimate). The present: his famed That Which I Should Have Done, I Did Not Do--a careful study of a mouldering wax funeral wreath on a grumous door.

Nancy Bruff, whose high-pressured novel The Manatee made her one of Park Avenue's greatest women writers, celebrated the pleasures of motherhood in a little piece for the New York Journal-American. In conclusion she informed her readers: "As for myself, I hope to produce another book and another baby next year."

Fugitives

Eugene O'Neill and Greta Garbo, dodge-the-press champions in the men's and women's divisions, briefly stopped dodging, met the press head on--but separately--in Manhattan.

O'Neill, 57, gaunt, greying, his hands ashake with paralysis agitans, was in town for rehearsals of The Iceman Cometh (his first play on Broadway in twelve years). He said he had written nothing since 1943. "I hope to resume writing as soon as I can," said he, "but the war has thrown me completely off base.... I have to get back to a sense of writing being worthwhile. ... I'd have to pretend."

Garbo, 40 but unwrinkled, back from a two-months' visit to her native Sweden, dodged the question of whether she had dodged the press. "I have not been elusive," said she. "It's simply that I think being in the papers is silly. . . . Anyone who does a job properly has a right to privacy." She had not done a cinema job in six years. Did she plan to make another picture? "No." What would she do now? "I'm sort of drifting." There was a report that she would marry. "Oh, is there? Well, well." What was that perfume she was wearing? "I haven't any." Garbo had an idea: "You take your friends," said she to one of the reporters, "and go home. That is better. You go have coffee."

Slings & Arrows

Ronald Colman, 55, was in a Santa Monica hospital with infection and fever, but his doctor said he was "going to come through all right."

Bishop William T. Manning of New York, 80, down with arthritis at his summer home, had to beg off hearing the Archbishop of Canterbury preach at Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Admiral Marc A. Mitscher, 59, commander of the Eighth Fleet, was progressing "quite satisfactorily" after an emergency appendectomy in Malta.

President Anastasio Somozo, 50, arrived in Boston in his uniform of a general of the Nicaraguan Army, entered a clinic for an intestinal operation.

Senator Theodore G. Bilbo and his sore mouth, recovered from surgery in New Orleans, went quietly home.

Muggers

Kathleen Norris, grande dame of serial fictioneers, bravely got into character for a role in a Los Gatos, Calif. pageant (see cut). Her awful task: to play mama cat in a pantomime of the Three Little Kittens nursery rhyme.

Lillian & Dorothy Gish, 49 and 48, encountered cameras when they returned from a two-month trip to Europe, fell into natural poses, looked as if they had hardly budged since their early days in silents--when Dorothy played the bright-eyed parts and Lillian the sweet ones (see cut).

Bob Hope finally had proof he could be funny without reciting somebody else's gags: in Denver, surgeons removed a chicken bone from a woman who had swallowed it while laughing at Hope's photograph.

Royalty

Ex-King Humbert of Italy, whose home-from-home has been an ancient, ghost-gusty villa near Lisbon, no longer had to go to bed by candlelight. The Portuguese Government quietly installed a lighting system (by night, so as not to upset Humbert's sensitive wife, Marie Jose), and the old place blazed with electricity for the first time in its gloomy history. The ghosts faded away. But now patches on the upholstery and worn spots on the rugs showed. And Marie Jose wished for oil lamps. They were "more romantic," said she.

Princess Elizabeth's husband was chosen for her once more by the London press. The report this time--promptly denied by Buckingham Palace--was that she was about to become engaged to her third cousin, 25-year-old Prince Philip* of Greece. A few of the past candidates (some since disqualified by history or marriage): Prince Regent Charles of Belgium, Prince Carl Johan of Sweden, Prince Gorm of Denmark, the Earl of Euston, the Duke of Rutland, Crown Prince Jean and Prince Charles of Luxembourg, Princes Tomislav and Andreja of Yugoslavia.

*Son of the late Prince Andrew (uncle of Greece's George) and Princess Alice, Lord Louis Mountbatten's sister.

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