"The only thing that cuts a little ice," E. M. Forster once wrote, "is affection or the possibility of affection." When his 85th birthday rolled around on New Year's Day, the author of A Passage to India eschewed any public remembrances or large party, instead spent the holidays with Robert Buckingham, 40, a Coventry probation officer. The two met when Buckingham was ten and have been fast friends ever since. "I spent a very quiet day on my birthday with him, his wife and their three children," said the gentle, aging bachelor. "I suppose by American standards you'd say it was a dull British day, but I like to have the children around me."

They don't actually have to start with that penny-ante stuff, but the experience could be useful. So it was that Sydney Lawford, 7, and her cousin, Maria Shriver, 8, went into business in front of the Palm Beach mansion of Grandfather Joseph P. Kennedy. Shrewd choice of location. The manse fronts on much-traveled North County Road--and their product, cold drinks priced at a nickel a gulp, quickly attracted a large clientele. But shortly the cops stepped in. Peddling without a license? No. Traffic jam.

It seemed only right to ask Lord Jellicoe, 45, to open London's international boat show. A son of a former admiral of the fleet and himself First Lord of the Admiralty, he is obviously the saltiest of salts. Except that he isn't. "This happens to be the first boat show I have ever been to," he confessed. And having let that out, he plunged full steam ahead. As a small boy he had capsized a good many more dinghies than most other small boys, and apart from "a bit of paddling" about the Mediterranean during the war. he really wasn't the least bit qualified to open the exhibit. In fact, he said, throwing it all up, "I get frightfully seasick."

After all those nights with the iguana down Mexico way, Director John Huston, 57, must have been getting used to "Juan." But it turns out he prefers "Sean." An Irishman by heritage, and a between-films resident of the Ould Sod for twelve years, the Missouri-born Huston has renounced his U.S. citizenship in favor of becoming Irish. "A person should be a citizen of the country in which he lives," said he. "I suppose it's a sort of atavism--a desire to get back to my ancestral roots. I've been thinking of this move for a couple of years. It has nothing to do with taxes."

What Ed wants, Ed usually gets. And what he wanted Right Now for the Ed Sullivan Show was Sister Luc-Gabrielle, 28, better known as the Singing Nun, Soeur Sourire, who zipped to the top of the record heap with Dominique. But Soeur Sourire shies away from her success. So Good Roman Catholic Ed asked the New York archdiocese to put in a word, and off he flew to tape a carefully supervised 18-minute session in the Dominican monastery near Waterloo, Belgium. "As a Catholic and a gentleman, I wouldn't argue with them," said TV's top impresario. "They ran the show." The fee? "No money," said the Mother Prioress, "but we have a mission in the Congo. Would it be possible to send a heavy-duty Jeep with rain curtains?" Ed is out shopping for the most waterproof Willys he can find.

From Manhattan's Masie Cox, 18, to Washington D.C.'s Nikia Clark, 18, the presentation of 50 girls at the silk-bedecked International Debutante Ball took a full hour before things finally settled down to dancing (the twist was Out, the charleston In). But no one seemed to mind as the girls from 12 foreign lands and 13 American states put on their own beauty contest--each lass escorted by assigned service-academy cadets and personally chosen Ivy League types. Everybody's favorite foreign find was Scotland's bonnie Marney Jane Bulman, 19, and domestically, New Jersey came out very nicely, thank you, with both its debs Gretchen Boyer, 18, and Janet Coates, 18. Even so, the friendly "Hey there, nice to see you" spirit of such Texans as Lucy Ross, 18, won the loudest applause. And the Texas gals drew well-modulated oohs with ever-deeper, doom-defying curtsies that started when Bonnie Bowman, 19, gracefully dipped her forehead to within a wisp of touchdown.

Among the various business ventures of John Glenn, 42, and the six other original U.S. astronauts, none triggered so much flak as their two-year-old investment in the luxurious, 129-room Cape Colony Inn at Cape Kennedy. NASA superiors argue that the investment could be construed as unseemly capitalization on the space program. Not so, cries Astronaut Attorney Leo DeOrsey, 60, but "we felt that if it's distasteful to the boss, let's get out." So out they got, with each of the boys netting a tidy $6,000 profit on an initial $7,500 outlay. DeOrsey, who put up more than $50,000 at the start, was not saying how much he came away with.

Ill lay: Spencer Tracy, 63, in his Los Angeles home, with a continuing respiratory ailment complicated by diabetes; Cincinnati Reds' Manager Fred Hutchinson, 44, in his physician brother's Seattle home, with a malignancy in an undisclosed area; Brendan Behan, 40, in Dublin's Meath Hospital, with pneumonia and head injuries after he was found lying in a pool of blood. He had been out celebrating his exit from the Royal City of Dublin Hospital.

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