Milestones: Dec. 18, 1964

• Share

(2 of 2)

Died. Lord Marks. 76, Britain's foremost retailer, who built a string of penny bazaars founded by his father into the huge, thriving Marks & Spencer clothing chain (239 stores, annual sales of $564 million), diverted much of his fortune to Jewish charities, notably Israel's Hebrew University and Weizmann Institute of Science; of a heart attack; in London.

Died. Dame Edith Sitwell, 77, peppery British poetess, whose acerb verdicts on her critics were as memorable as her melodious verse; of a heart attack; in London (see THE WORLD).

Died. Alma Werfel, 85. Viennese intellectual and wife to three geniuses, who took up with her second husband. Architect Walter Gropius, while still married to her first, Composer Gustav Mahler, had an illegitimate son by the late Austrian Novelist Franz Werfel (The Song of Bernadette). for whom she later divorced Gropius, explaining "the greater a man's achievements are, the more I love him"; of bronchitis, in Manhattan. In her autobiography she also told of her affair with Austrian Painter Oskar Kokoschka, said she was immortally roled by Dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann ("In another life," he said, "we two must be lovers") and memorably serenaded by Russian Conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch.

Died. Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, 88, Railroad Tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt's regal great-granddaughter, who in 1895 became one of the first U.S. heiresses to join European nobility when her mother forced her into marriage with the Duke of Marlborough; of a stroke; in Southampton, N.Y. Duchess Consuelo gave Marlborough $100,000 a year, dutifully carried out mother-in-law's first command—to bear a son to prevent "that little upstart Winston [Churchill]" from inheriting the title—only to find that their children and her money were all that she and the duke had in common; in 1920 she divorced him to marry the late French Aviator Jacques Balsan, thereafter presided over the social life of the Riviera and her native Long Island.