Ford’s Widow in Driver’s Seat at $10 Million a Year

--In a celebrated battle that has been compared to the television histrionics of the Ewings on “Dallas,” Kathleen DuRoss Ford has reached a settlement with the family of her late husband, auto magnate Henry Ford II, that will guarantee her at least $10 million a year. The settlement was far more generous than the provisions of the original trust Ford signed in 1984, which gave her only $1.5 million a year. The former auto show model was Ford’s third wife and 23 years his junior when they wed in 1980. Relations between Kathleen Ford, 48, and her stepchildren have been anything but cordial. Charlotte Ford Downe, Ford’s daughter, termed the dispute over her father’s $350-million estate “disgusting.” Kathleen Ford’s attorney, Robert Montgomery, meanwhile, said Ford’s children treat their stepmother “like dirt.” Ford died last year at age 70. Palm Beach County, Fla., Circuit Court Judge Vaughn Rudnick approved the settlement after a brief hearing just before the much publicized suit was to go to trial.

--When the women’s history library at Radcliffe College was founded in 1943, “it was such an event when one researcher came that we offered her tea,” recalled assistant library director Elizabeth Shenton. All that has changed, and this week the library officially reopened to great fanfare after a $3.5-million renovation. The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America now houses more than 30,000 volumes and 750 major manuscript collections, including the papers of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and feminist Betty Friedan. Here, one can research the early women’s suffrage movement, peruse the 5,000-cookbook collection named for chef Julia Child, or review such etiquette books as “No Nice Girls Swear” and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s “Book of Common Sense Etiquette.” The library was renamed in 1965 to honor Harvard history professor Schlesinger and his wife, who was a historian of women and active in the League of Women Voters.

--There’s nothing like a little publicity to boost sales. Demand for Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz’s estimated 50 novels and short story collections has surged since he won the Nobel Prize last week, booksellers in Cairo report. Most bookshops sold out of Mahfouz’s novels, which deal with life in the Egyptian capital, within two days of his award. Sobhy Grace, owner of the Anglo-Egyptian Bookshop in central Cairo said: “We used to have tourists asking for guides and maps. Now they ask for Mahfouz.”