It was a career any man could be proud of, leading him from law school through the attorney general's office to become, in 1952, at the age of 34, West Virginia's youngest Governor in history. Four years later, he ran for the Senate but was defeated--and then William C. Marland dropped from public sight. Last week he held a brief press conference in Chicago. A reporter had spotted him behind the wheel of a taxi, making $70 a week. "I simply fell apart because of my drinking," he said, explaining that he had bounced around from job to job until now he has joined Alcoholics Anonymous and is trying to make a new start. He drives for the Flash Cab Co. twelve hours a day, visits his wife and four children in a Chicago suburb only on weekends while he rehabilitates himself. "I'd like to get back into the mainstream of life," he said. "But not politics."

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Was she really in, or way way out? There sat Britain's Princess Margaret, 34, at a rehearsal of the Royal Ballet School's Prince Igor, showing quite a bit of black mesh stockings all acrawl with dozens of artificial beetles. Bug beetles, with two e's, if you please. "The Royal Family in kinky"--meaning nonconformist--"stockings at last," chirped the London Sun's Fashion Writer Jean Rook, who then swatted: "Are Margaret's new, or were they hidden away in her bottom drawer?" They cost only 6s. 11d., continued the ruthless Rook, and while they're still the rage in the U.S., the fad is waning in England. Selfridges stopped selling them a year ago --all of which goes to show that Meg's royal duties obviously leave her little time to think kinky.

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Genealogists are digging into the roots of the Roosevelt family tree to find out more about a mid-17th century gentleman recalled by Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., 50. Chatting with newsmen in Washington, the Under Secretary of Commerce explained that although he's related in one way or another to twelve U.S. Presidents, "including my father,"* it really doesn't help much in politics. There is one ancestor with contemporary significance, he added--his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, a second-generation American named Humphrey Johnson.

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Classic or simply crummy, the bulk of modern English lewd literature first tumbled into print in the Paris loft of Maurice Girodias, 45, proprietor of Olympia Press. Now, laments the first publisher of Tropic of Cancer, The Black Book, Lolita, Fanny Hill and Candy, "our role is ended." Through the imposition, by his count, of 60 bans, 100 lawsuits and six suspended prison sentences, the French government has finally got through to Girodias. "The astonishing truth is," he says, "that moral and artistic freedom have now become a reality in Britain and the U.S., whereas the same concepts are being denied, denigrated and officially ostracized in France." So Girodias is planning to pack his plain wrappers and open an Olympia office in Manhattan, where, he asserts, "It will only take five or ten years for censorship to disappear completely in America."

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There's nothing like a few hours lying on a Florida pad to relax the old muscles. But this pad was at Cape Kennedy, and Astronauts Gus Grissom, 38, and Lieut. Commander John W. Young, 34, could be pardoned for feeling a mite tense. They were on their backs, 100 ft. up, in a sealed Gemini capsule atop a fully fueled Titan II rocket while launching personnel put the spacecraft through a mock countdown. And there they lay for 2 hr. 54 min., while the booster's second stage leaked fuel, a computer went haywire, and enough other foul-ups developed to scrub a real shot. But that's what practices are for, said NASA, holding to its projected launch date of March 22 for the first U.S. two-man mission in space.

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Compared to elephant hunting in the jungles of Mysore or bullfighting in Toledo, it should have been child's play. Confidently the vacationing Shah of Iran, 45, stepped up to the line in a Cambridgeshire pub and lofted three darts at the board. Kerplop, kerplop, two flew wide and dropped to the floor. Setting aside her 'arf pint, Queen Farah Diba, 26, demurely followed her husband to the line. There was a gleam in the lady's eye. Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! She neatly ringed the bull's-eye. Farah pooh-poohed it all, but a bricklayer in the public side had an eye for form. "I wouldn't have minded playing him for a fiver," said he.

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How 'bout that? Must have been 25 years since that nice Allen boy went away to broadcast baseball in New York, and since the folks down South aren't exactly Yankee lovers, they didn't hear much of his renowned play-by-play. Now Mel Allen, 52, has a little something against those damyankees himself. They fired him. Well, maybe it's all for the best, because the Mellow tones will ring out over his native clay this season. He has signed on to broadcast the Atlanta end of radio and TV coverage for the National League's Milwaukee Braves, who have switched much of their programming to Atlanta prior to moving there in 1966.

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"I live and love by no rules but my own," said Brigitte Bardot, 30, and the rules of this particular menage had a certain touch of Bronx Zoo. On location with Co-Stars Jeanne Moreau and George Hamilton for Viva Maria! in Cuernavaca, B.B. set up housekeeping in a sumptuous villa with a whole menagerie of cuddly companions: a dog, a rabbit, two ducks, a chicken, and Playboy Bob Zagury, production assistant on the set, whose off-duty role sometimes gets pretty beastly. "Last night he was very angry," she told newsmen candidly. "The rabbit was very naughty in the bed."

*Besides Dad: George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, William Henry Harrison, Ulysses Grant, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft.

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