Leg Work

Elder Statesman Bernard Mannes Baruch got a wire of thanks from Mrs. Winston Churchill. She said that she and her daughters were glad to have a couple of dozen silk stockings he had slipped among the Prime Minister's effects for them.

Emcees

Slim Lauretta Jefferson, great-granddaughter of the late, beloved actor Joe Jefferson (Rip van Winkle), was ready in New York to hit the tanbark as the first ringmistress of Ringling Bros.' new "Continental Circus."

In Manhattan's Hotel Plaza, titian-topped Countess Renée Maeterlinck told how she got her husband, octogenarian Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck, to write the memoirs he will publish next autumn: "I trap him as a cat would a mouse. I ask him questions. I make him answer me. Then pretty soon he's writing a book."

Saludos, Amigos

Three-chinned Diego Rivera and one-handed José Clemente Orozco, famed Mexican mural painters, have had years of hot personal differences. Last month Rivera walked into Orozco's studio to ask for a few pointers on fresco technique. Last week, in a lecture to an audience which included Orozco, Rivera called him the greatest living artist in their field.

Fortunes of War

Nineteen-year-old Frederick Cecil Bartholomew's noggin, once famed for its curls in his days as a child cinemactor, has been "G.I." for three months. In Amarillo, Tex., British-born Bartholomew got the U.S. citizenship his army time entitled him to seek. Asked by girl reporters if he had made any other pledges, the First Class Private answered: "No. I'm safe for a while yet."

Manhattan taxpayer and Presidential yachtmate Vincent Astor was upped to captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve, 15 months after going on active duty. He is "attached to the office of the Eastern Sea Frontier."

A week after the death in Alaska of his father, Major Kermit Roosevelt, Dirck Roosevelt, 18, asked for immediate induction.

Flip Skip

Honor guest at a newspapermen's jamboree in his home town of Erie, Pa. was Lieut. Colonel Philip G. Cochran. With him was his old Ohio State University chum, Cartoonist Milton Arthur Caniff, who put him into Terry and the Pirates as long-jawed, rip-roaring Flip Corkin. Thirty-three-year-old Fighter Pilot Cochran said that people were always asking him about his girl in the cartoon (Taffy, now No-Name Miss). Of a successful raid he said: "I figured that if I tossed the general staff around some and blew up their headquarters ... it would delay them some."

Round 3