Milestones, Dec. 8, 1947

Married. Arthur Alan Compton, 29, U.S. State Department representative on UNESCO's staff, son of Nobel Physicist Arthur Holly Compton; and Nathalie Xenie Felser, 28, daughter of Parisian Banker Emanuel L. Felser; in Mexico City.

Married. Margaret Osborne, 29, homespun hazel-eyed tennist (seven times national women's doubles champion, 1947 Wimbledon singles titleholder); and William du Pont, 51, banker-sportsman; she for the first time, he for the second; in Wilmington.

Divorced. By Ralph Bellamy, 43, thrice-married star of Broadway's State of the Union: Ethel Smith, 34, "hot" organist; after two years, two months of marriage, no children; in Gooding, Idaho.

Died. General Jacques Leclerc (Vicomte Philippe François Marie Leclerc de Hauteclocque) 45, wartime field commander hero of the Fighting French, postwar Inspector-General of the French Army; in a plane crash; near Colomb-Bechar, on the Algeria-Morocco border. Brilliant, dashing, and a master tankman, Leclerc escaped from France in 1940, assumed the nom de guerre to avoid reprisals on his family.

Died. George E. Dietrich, 53, one of the McKesson & Robbins drug firm officers who swindled the firm out of about $11,000,000 in the late '30s; of leukemia; in Roslyn, L.I. Assistant Treasurer Dietrich (born Musica) worked with President F. Donald Coster (real name: Philip Musica) and two other brothers in the firm in the two-year embezzlement, but ratted on his brothers in court, escaped with a 2½-year prison sentence.

Died. Ernst Lubitsch, 55, roguish ("Puck with a cigar") movie producer-director who got his famed "Lubitsch touch" from the late wunderbare Producer-Director Max Reinhardt and left it on a score of sophisticated implausibilities (Monte Carlo, Ninotchka, Cluny Brown); of a heart ailment; in Bel-Air, Calif. Lubitsch, whose German-made Gypsy Blood and Passion brought Emil Jannings, Pola Negri and a grace-note style of cinema comedy to the U.S. in 1919, was one of the first European directors to earn—and keep—Hollywood's cash-&-carry respect.

Died. George Rector, 69, last of the restaurateur Rectors of Manhattan's lobster-&-champagne era; of a heart ailment; in Manhattan. Apple-cheeked, white-haired George carried on when father Charles died in 1914, but bowed out when Prohibition closed his last café in 1923; thereafter he nourished the Rector legend and himself by diligent publicity work, lecturing and writing, wound up as food consultant for a Chicago meat packer.