MANNERS & MORALS: Musical Chairs

MANNERS & MORALS

The headlines announced it. Tin-Plate Heir Henry J. ("Bob") Topping Jr. and Lana Turner, blonde and nubilissimous cinemactress, would be married as soon as he could get a divorce from Actress Arline Judge. From Hollywood, wires signed "Lana and Bob Topping" went out to 150 friends, inviting them to a big celebration at the swank Mocambo Club.

Many a U.S. citizen who still thought of marriage as a relatively permanent relation was mildly surprised that a married man should announce his "engagement" to another woman. But no one in the Right Set, as the columnists sometimes call café society, batted a jaded eye.

Bob Topping, 33, has been married three times: to Chorus Girl Jayne Shadduck, Heiress Gloria ("Mimi") Baker (two children), and, since last April, to Arline.

Arline, 35, has been married five times, including one three-year stretch with Bob Topping's older brother Dan (who has been married four times). Arline's other husbands: Cinema Director Wesley Ruggles, R.A.F. Captain James R. Addams* and Huckster Vincent Morgan Ryan, to whom she was still married when she met Bob in Hollywood and fell "plain mad nutsie in love."

Lana Turner, 27, has been married to Band Leader Artie Shaw and Actor Stephen Crane (married, annulled, remarried, divorced—one child). She had also been linked, as the columnists say, with Turhan Bey, George Huntington Hartford Jr., Victor Mature, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power and—just before she met Topping—a Yale man named Talbot.

Last week, from her Manhattan hotel suite, Arline announced that she would contest her husband's divorce. Bob, said Arline somewhat crossly, was using the Connecticut courts "as a tool to enable him to exchange one wife for another." Lana promptly backtracked. She could under no circumstances announce her engagement "to a man who is not free," she said.

The party was called off. But "love" would find a way. Soon there would be another "marriage" in the Right Set.