Born. To William Wyler, 42, short, swart director who graduated from bang-bang Westerns to a closer walk with art. (Wuthering Heights, Mrs. Miniver), and Margaret Tallichet Wyler, 30, almost Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind: their third child, first son; in Hollywood. Name: William Jr. Weight: 9 lbs. 1 oz.

Born. To Bennett A. (Try and Stop Me) Cerf, 47, joke collector, publisher (Random House-Modern Library), self-styled "superficial fellow with catholic tastes"; and Phyllis Eraser Cerf, 30, one time cinemactress: their second child, second son; in Manhattan. Name: Jonathan Fraser. Weight: 6 lbs. 11 oz.

Married. Vera Zorina, 29, prima ballerina turned musicomedienne; and Goddard Lieberson, 35, vice president of Columbia Recording Corp.; both for the second time; in Manhattan.

Died. Vincent Youmans, 47, composer of some of the nation's most hummed tunes (Tea for Two, Without a Song, Hallelujah); of tuberculosis; in Denver.

He outraged his father, a prosperous Manhattan hatter, by insisting on songwriting ("Why didn't you become a bootlegger and be done with it?"), turned out the suave scores of No, No, Nanette* and Flying Down to Rio before chronic illness blighted his career at full bloom.

Died. Edward Brewster Sheldon, 60, once-prominent U.S. playwright (Ro mance, Song of Songs); of coronary thrombosis; in Manhattan. Stricken with progressive paralysis in 1923 and total blindness in 1931, he remained to the last very much part of the Broadway scene, heard and passed on most scripts before they were produced, made his East 84th Street apartment the gathering place of Katharine Cornell, Helen Hayes, John Barrymore, a stageful of others.

Died. Colonel Albert Arnold Sprague, 69, wholesale grocer (Sprague Warner-Kenny Corp.), onetime "generalissimo" of Chicago's anti-crime committee, power behind Mayor Anton J. Cermak's short lived civic-reform drive (which ended in 1933 when Cermak was killed by an assassin's bullet intended for Franklin D. Roosevelt); in Chicago.

Died. Thomas Dixon, 82, unreconstructed Southern novelist; in Raleigh, N.C. His best-known work, The Clans man, an idealization of the original Ku Klux Klan as the South's knights in shining armor, became the first million-dollar movie (The Birth of a Nation, 1915). Lawyer, politician, Baptist minister, son of a Klan founder, he capitalized on race prejudice, harped loud & long on white ("Aryan") supremacy, sold over 5,000,000 copies of his 20 novels.

* For news of No, No, in Paris, see THEATER.

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