Words & Music

At a 'Hollywood nightclub, Frank Sinatra slugged a Hearst columnist.

Five days later the affair was still not on the United Nations agenda; but a lot of people probably wondered why not. On both U.S. coasts, day after day, Hearst-papers gave the story headlines and space almost fit for an attempted political assassination.

Frankie said he had overheard the columnist--Lee Mortimer of the New York Daily Mirror--refer to him as "that Dago son of a bitch." So he hit him in the jaw, once, and knocked him down. Mortimer said he was "just minding my own business"--leaving the place with an Oriental girl friend--when Frankie snuck up behind him and hit him back of the left ear. Then, said Mortimer, "at least two men" held him and he was slugged some more.

Frankie was charged with battery and freed on $500 bail. He would be tried by a jury May 27. He flew off to Manhattan, where the Council Against Intolerance in America gave him a prize for other efforts. Manhattan's left-winging tabloid PM, on Frankie's side, dignified the brawl with a 1,000-word editorial. (He "must have warmed the hearts of millions," said PM--but conceded that this was probably not the best way to strike a blow at race prejudice.) In the Hearstpapers--which painstakingly reviewed Frankie's association with left-wing groups, his 4-F draft status, his crooning activities during the war, his meeting with ex-super-pimp Charles "Lucky" Luciano in Havana--little-noted Columnist Mortimer suddenly attained the stature of a Dreyfus, and a fortune's worth of publicity.

Fellow Columnist Earl Wilson muttered plaintively in the New York Post: "Won't somebody swing at me? Anybody at all."

Kudos

To Fiorello LaGuardia, for "public service . . . fearless expression ... of the highest ideals of One World," went the annual One World Award established in memory of Wendell Willkie.

To Helen Hayes, for "the outstanding performance by an American actress on the current New York stage [Happy Birthday']" went the annual Barter Theater Award--"one Virginia ham and a platter to eat it off of; one acre of land on the side of a mountain near Abingdon [Va.]." To Actress Jinx Falkenburg, from some 50,000 admiring beauticians in convention in Manhattan, went the title, America's No. 1 Brunette. Actress Rita Hayworth (who used to be a redhead, and before that a brunette) was chosen No. 1 Blonde, and Actress Evelyn Keyes (who used to be a blonde) No. 1 Redhead.

The Personal Approach

The way it is, and how it feels:

"I'm too young to think of romance," said Cinemactress Peggy Ann Garner. At 15, she had reached woman's estate in Hollywood and was making a standard denial of standard gossip. She and wealthy, 18-year-old Viscount Furness,* said Peggy, were just good friends.

"The Stork Club," declared Sherman Billingsley, its money-making proprietor, "is more of a hobby with me than a business. I get a big kick out of it." He wanted to die working at the Stork, said he.

"If I had to be born in another century," mused Henry Agard Wallace, answering a poll by This Month magazine, "I would prefer the 21st, the 22nd, the 23rd or the 24th . . . assuming that we learn how to control atomic power for peace. . . ."

"I sometimes think," thought Actress Cornelia Otis Skinner, "that any other century . . . would have been a better one. . . ."

"The first thing you notice in Hollywood," reported British Cinemactress Ann Todd, now back home, ". . . is that you're tremendously important." She had been treated like a queen, she told the London Daily Express, but "never think they love you, because they don't." Cooperation? "If you don't surrender your whole life, including your husband, children, home and private thoughts," recalled Miss Todd, "they will say: 'Miss Todd, you're not being cooperative.'"

"I think Hollywood people are as nice and normal," said Mickey Rooney, "as any neighbors you'd find anywhere. . . . They're completely normal, and after all, it's normal to be normal."

The Old Gang

Ex-Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes reached 85 in Manhattan in good shape, spent the day quietly with his three children, nine grandchildren.

Roszika Dolly, of the once-famed Dolly Sisters, who danced from World War I right on through the '20s, survived a derailment of the Santa Fe's Super Chief near Raton, N.Mex. The car she was in overturned; Roszika, now Mrs. Irving Netcher, and 54, broke her left arm. Police fished through the wreckage and recovered her jewels--about $300,000 worth.

Charles A. Lindbergh, onetime America Firster, who used to make mind-our-own-business-and-stay-out-of-war speeches, raised his voice after long silence and plumped for "a consistent American policy toward Europe," i.e., full aid to all "peoples who believe in ... a way of life that is basically similar to our own." Observed Lindbergh: "We have destroyed Nazi Germany only to find that ... we have strengthened Communist Russia. . .. We must re-establish and protect the ideals we believe in. ... It may require the use of military force. But no necessary cost is too high. . . ."

Babe Ruth, who spent most of the winter in a Manhattan hospital after a neck operation, flew to Florida for two weeks in the sun, played nine holes of golf in 45, and caught a 50-lb. sailfish. He was back in baseball at 52--as "consultant" to the boys' baseball program that Ford Motor Co. runs with the American Legion. Besides his salary (undisclosed), the onetime home-run king gets a shiny new Lincoln.

The Literary Life

Author Elliott Roosevelt was about to be available to the Russians in Russian. Soon to be published: a Moscow edition of As He Saw It.

Eugene O'Neill scored a triumph the hard way, in Frankfurt, Germany. His Mourning Becomes Electra, once banned by the Nazis, was played there without an intermission. It took 5 1/2 hours, got 15 curtain calls.

Francis Cardinal Spellman contributed some of his own versifying to Manhattan's formal presentation of seven city acres to U.N. Excerpt from the Cardinal's poetic invocation:

America is Thine, 0 God of Nations,

Thine, to use for all nations' sake,

Thine the breath over hill and valley

And from sea to shining sea.

*Whose mother, Lady Furness, is Gloria Vanderbilt Stokowski's aunt.

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