The premiere promoters hustled Sex Symbol Brigitte Bardot off to Hollywood for the West Coast opening of Viva Maria! and Sex Symbol Sophia Loren had Manhattan all to herself. Well, not all. Such other delightful images as Julie Christie and Geraldine Chaplin paraded into Broadway's Capitol theater for the premiere of Doctor Zhivago, but the crowd saved the rave for Sophia, who didn't even play in the picture. She just tagged along in white mink cape and Dior gown with Producer Carlo Ponti, her once and future husband. In all the crush, Sophia and Carlo were beaming because of some moral support they'd got from the French government the day before. Carlo, a new-vintage French citizen, obtained a Paris divorce from his first wife, can now marry Sophia legally, even though those bigamy charges against him still haven't got straightened out in Rome.
Two weeks ago the faculty at M.I.T.'s Alfred P. Sloan School of Management held a fine farewell party for Dean Howard Wesley Johnson, 43, who was leaving to become executive vice president of Cincinnati's Federated Department Stores, Inc. Now the professors are kidding Johnson that he really ought to hand back that silver tea service they presented to him as a going-away gift. M.I.T.'s committee on succession turned around and named Johnson, a specialist in industrial relations and executive development, as M.I.T.'s new president, to succeed retiring Physicist Julius Stratton.
In days of old, when peers were bold, and life peeresses weren't invented, Britain's House of Lords decreed that when a member rose to speak he must be "uncovered"--meaning wearing neither hat nor coronet. But Baroness Burton of Coventry, 61, feels positively naked without one of her "super-trilbys" on. And besides, she trilled to the Lords' procedural committee, every time a lady doffs her hat just to do some talking, she wrecks the hairdo. With matters thus brought to a head, the committee waived the 344-year-old rule, allowed that the girls could talk with their hats on. In a black stovepipe creation, Lady Burton immediately spoke out: "The peers have stood up to it very well."
His four grown boys have long since been on their own, so now the Groaner is breaking in a new generation. Harry Lillis Crosby III, 7, came on with the old man for a taped Christmas production of ABC's Hollywood Palace, crooned through a treble version of Oh Come, Little Children that had Papa Bing Crosby, 61, muttering proudly backstage: "Say, that little tiger did all right." While the boys were hamming it up for TV, Mama Kathy Grant Crosby took Mary Frances, 6, up to the Hyatt Music Theater near San Francisco to make her debut as a bit-player in a musical Peter Pan but alas, Kathy got panned as Peter. The San Francisco Examiner's Critic Jeanne Miller took after poor Mary Frances as well, with the slightly weird complaint that she was "stodgy."
A big holiday wreath was on the front door of the Gettysburg farmhouse, the tree was trimmed, and Dwight Eisenhower, 75, just a week out of Washington's Walter Reed Hospital after recovery from his November heart attack in Augusta, Ga., settled down with Mamie, his son John and four grandchildren for a private and grateful Christmas. His doctors' greetings: he can take short strolls and climb stairs now. Said Ike with a grin: "I expect I'll be playing golf again within a month--but slowly."
As Bob Hope, 61, explained it: "A funny thing happened to me on the way to take a bow." All set to start the laughs for 2,000 G.I.s at Thailand's Korat Air Base as part of his 14th an nual Christmas tour of U.S. overseas installations, the comic slipped off a backstage platform and sailed into the arms of a burly security man, who broke the fall a bit. With two ligaments torn in his left ankle, Bob went on anyhow, even limped through a soft-shoe routine with Actress Carroll Baker. Later the leg was taped up to ease the "shooting pains," but Hope was cracking happily that his North Hollywood draft board had already given him a physical exam. "And then," he said, "they burned my draft card."
And when they tangle with Alworth
and Ladd,
The Buffalo Bills will know they've
been had.
Cassius Clay? Not this time. California's Governor Pat Brown, 60, was sicking his doggerel on New York's Nelson Rockefeller, 57, betting him "one box of assorted fresh California fruit" that the San Diego Chargers would whip the Bills for the American Football League championship. Nelson, stout feller, staked a crate of New York State apples on it, and after some musing wrote Brown:
When the game's final whistle
Makes the stadium mute
You'll be left to your sighing
While I'm munching your fruit.
"My body is only incidental. It's my spirit that's real," averred World Citizen Garry, Davis, 44, two years after he gave up his U.S. passport in 1948 to found his cult of statelessness and world unity. Now, long after the crusades in which he enlisted Albert Camus and Andre Gide into Les Compagnons de Garry Davis, issued Jawaharlal Nehru one of his "world passports" and transformed himself temporarily from a freak into something of a world figure, Davis is living in Strasbourg, France. The son of U.S. Society Bandleader Meyer Davis, he is still nobody's citizen, but he has a wife, two children, and he keeps body and soul together with a real spirited little business: the Garry Davis Diaper Service.
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