IN ONE DAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 161, 10 July 1935, Page 13

IN ONE DAY.

DIVORCE, REMARRIAGE.

NOVELIST IN LIMELIGHT.

(From Our Own Correspondent.) SAN FRANCISCO, Juno 15. Pearl Buck, the former missionary who became famous for her novels about China, won a divorce and a new husband in a strange marital triangle revealed in the Reno divorce courts. She divorced John L. Buck and then married Richard J. Walsh, a 'wealthy New York publisher, after her intimate friend, Mrs. Ruth A. Walsli, had obtained a legal j separation from him. ! Mrs. Walsh apparently willingly stepped aside when she learned of the romance between her husband and her friend. The two women lived together for six weeks while they established their Nevada residence, and Mrs. Walsh witnessed the marriage of her former husband to the celebrated novelist. Both women alleged cruelty in their divorce suits, and the private trials, heard behind closed doors, were completed within ten minutes. Then Mrs. Buck and Walsh, who is a partner in the company which recently published the novelist's trilogy, "House of Earth," wero married by Rev. R. C. Thompson, dean of men at the University of Nevada and an ordained Baptist minister. Each couple had been married for many years. The Bucks, married in 1917, have two children, Carol, aged 15, and Janice, aged 10; while the Walshes, married in 1908, have a daughter of 17, Elizabeth. Agreements as to property rights and custody of their children were signed by *the couples, but the terms wero not disclosed. Mrs. Buck, whose novel, "The Good Earth," won the Pulitzer prize, returned to the United States from her missionary work in China in 1929. She severed her connection with missionary life in 1933 after she became the centre of a fundamentalist controversy in tho Presbyterian Church. ' Judge Moran granted Mrs. Walsh her divorce and Judge Curler gave Mrs. Buck a legal separation, whereupon the marriage liccnso was quickly obtained and tlie° ceremony was performed in the home of the Rev. Brewster Adams, of the Reno Baptist Church, who was absent from tho city. Immediately after the ceremony the newly married couple left by automobile on a honeymoon trip in California, closely paralleling the procedure of Princess Barbara Hutton and the Count Curt Reventlovr.