Divorced. Alan Jay Lerner, 56, Broadway lyricist-laureate (My Fair Lady, Camelot); By Karen Gundersen Lerner, 39, former Newsweek reporter who met him during a 1965 interview; after eight years of marriage, two years of separation, no children; in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Gundersen was Lerner's fifth wife.

Died. Nickolai G. Kuznetsov, 72, commander of the Soviet navy in World War II. Kuznetsov's advocacy of an aggressive "oceanic" strategy for the Soviet sea arm appealed to Stalin. He quickly rose through the ranks as senior officers were liquidated in the 1937- 38 purges, and became Navy Commissar in 1939 at the age of 37. Kuznetsov embarked on a massive cruiser and battleship building program and restored czarist-style discipline on shipboard, requiring officers to wear bone-handled swords. He mapped the naval strategy used against Finland in 1940, and later led his fleet against the Nazis. Demoted by a suspicious Stalin, he was reinstated in 1951 and finally fell from power in 1956, when Khrushchev decided that Kuznetsov's emphasis on a surface navy was out of date.

Died. John Gordon, 84, crusty, Scottish-born editor in chief of Lord Beaverbrook's Sunday Express; in London. In large part because of Gordon's news judgment, the circulation of the Sunday Express, which was about 560,000 when he became a co-editor in 1928, had grown to over 4 million by the time of his death. In 1940, let down by a contributor, Gordon himself dashed off a column that was such a success that he kept it up for over 30 years. His weekly "Current Affairs" sometimes tilted at members of Britain's royal family. Gordon bridled at the suggestion that Mark Phillips, Princess Anne's cavalry-captain husband, be given a title. No British monarch, the argument went, has ever had commoners as grandchildren. "Well, wouldn't this be a jolly good time to start?" Gordon snapped.

Died. Walter Lippmann, 85, sagacious titan of American journalism (see THE PRESS).

Died. Andre Geraud, 92, Cassandra-like French columnist known as Pertinax (Latin for resolute); in Segur-le-Chateau, France. In his daily columns in Echo de Paris, Pertinax in the 1930s warned about the danger of appeasing Hitler. When Nazi panzers crushed France in 1940, he escaped via Bordeaux on an English destroyer. In the U.S. during the war, he wrote his best-known work, The Gravediggers of France, a historical expose of the men responsible for his country's fall.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.