MANNERS & MORALS: The Bride Wore Pink

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MANNERS & MORALS

One morning last week, balding, bespectacled Bryant Bowden, editor of the weekly Okeechobee (Fla.) News, sauntered into the Okeechobee courthouse and stopped to eye the bulletin board in the main hall. Among the marriage-license applications, which, by Florida law, must be publicly posted for three days before a ceremony, he saw something which made him goggle. Winthrop Rockefeller, 35, of New York—the fourth of John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s five sons and one of the most eligible bachelors in the world—had stated his intention of marrying one Eva Sears, 31, also of New York.

Editor Bowden had a bitter moment—his paper would not be published for two days. Then he remembered that he was the Okeechobee correspondent for the Associated Press. He telephoned the A.P. office in Jacksonville. A few hours later, the whole U.S. journalistic horizon glowed a bright pink with the fireworks he had touched off.

While the first headlines blazed (and while Manhattan gossip columnists scrambled to assure their readers that they had known all about the romance for months), herds of reporters were dispatched to find an answer to the question: Who is Eva Sears? Hearst's Cholly Knickerbocker (Ghighi Cassini) haughtily announced that she was Mrs. Barbara Paul Sears of the fine old Philadelphia Pauls and thus a society girl of impeccable pedigree. He was wrong. Mrs. Sears was Cinderella, at least by all city-desk specifications.

Her parents were Lithuanian immigrants and she was born Jievute Paulekiute in a coal patch near Noblestown, Pa. In 1924, her mother got a divorce, took Jievute and her younger sister to Chicago. Mrs. Paulekas got a job in a mattress factory, married a carpenter named Peter Neveckas, settled down in an apartment near the stockyards. Jievute went to Chicago's Healy Grammar School, where two big things happened to her—she discovered that she was a very smart girl and she began calling herself Eva. At Englewood High School she shortened Paulekiute to Paul.

Blonde, buoyant Eva Paul had spontaneous, unaffected gaiety. She also had pretty legs. When the Lithuanian Daily News sponsored a Miss Lithuania contest in 1933, 17-year-old Eva Paul won it, ruled as Queen of Lithuanian Day at the Chicago World's Fair. When her mother and stepfather moved to a farm near Lowell, Ind., Eva slipped easily into the affairs of the town high school. By the time she was graduated in 1935, she was president of the Red Pepper Social Club and had acquired the highest of adolescent accolades—she was a "popular girl."

Mail-Order Model. She went to Northwestern University for a year and a half, then quit and got a job as a model. She posed for pictures for the Montgomery Ward catalogue. She went to New York, got a job playing Pearl in a road-show version of Tobacco Road.

She was in Boston on Christmas Eve, 1939. More specifically, she was on exclusive Beacon Hill, where candles were flickering, where carolers were singing and where, by tradition, old families held open house. She met a wealthy, socially prominent young man named Richard Sears Jr. He thought she was wonderful. They were married two years later, while she was in an Eddie Dowling show in New York.