Monday, May. 28, 1956

Married. Peggy Ann Garner, 24, kittenish cinemingenue (Black Widow), onetime child star (Junior Miss); and Albert Salmi, 28, Broadway actor (End As a Man, Bus Stop); she for the second time, he for the first; in Manhattan.

Married. Jean Ann Kennedy, 28, youngest daughter of ex-Ambassador to the Court of St. James's (1937-40) Joseph P. Kennedy, sister of Massachusetts' Democratic Senator John Kennedy; and Stephen Edward Smith, 28, Manhattan businessman; both for the first time; in Manhattan.

Divorced. By Glynis Johns, 32, slant-eyed, South African-born British cinemactress (Miranda, The Court Jester): David Ramsey Foster, 34, Manhattan businessman; after four years of marriage, no children; in London.

Divorced. Sonja Henie, 43, Norwegian-born onetime (1927-36) world figure-skating champion and sometime cinemactress (Thin Ice); by Winthrop Gardiner Jr., 43, socialite sportsman; after nearly seven years of marriage, no children; in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Died. Adrian Rollini, 51, xylophone player in the Adrian Rollini Trio, jazz-age member of the famed California Ramblers (other Ramblers: Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Ted Weems); of pneumonia and complications; in Homestead, Fla.

Died. Alexander A. Fadeyev, 55, top Soviet literary theorist of the late Stalin era (The Rout, Young Guard); reportedly by his own hand; in Moscow (see FOREIGN NEWS).

Died. Dr. Leo L. Spears, 62, highflying quack, head (since 1943) of Denver's glassy Spears Chiropractic Sanitarium; of a heart attack; in Denver. A lifelong anomaly in the medical profession, Dr. Spears was charged with manslaughter after a young (31) patient died six weeks after he opened his clinic, was acquitted, sued state health officials for $300,000, lost the case. He later sought damages for libel suits totaling some $36 million, never collected a nickel.

Died. Sir Max Beerbohm, 83, dumpling-shaped British wit, drama critic (The Saturday Review), caricaturist and satirist (Zuleika Dobson), last of the Victorian elegants; in Rapallo, Italy. One of literature's most modest, sparing and delicate talents, "the incomparable Max," as Shaw called him, belonged to an age of posturing geniuses and aesthetes (Burne-Jones, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Whistler, Oscar Wilde), was one of them but not one with them. With a few deft strokes of his caricaturist's drawing pen, he could put the lucubrations of a giant into gnat's perspective and keep the world itself in polite proportion. Wilde once remarked that he possessed the rare "gift of eternal old age." Despite his renown, Beerbohm remained a refugee not only from his talents ("My gifts are small, but I've used them discreetly and the result is a charming little reputation") and his time (he deplored the excesses of the 20th century), but from the world around him, retreated to Italy in 1910, where he lived ever after in isolated content. Polite to the end, he directed his last words to the housekeeper he married in secret last month as death approached: "Thank you for everything."

Died. Mary Herndon Ralston, 99, last survivor of nine children born to William Henry Herndon, Abraham Lincoln's longtime (21 years) law partner and biographer (Life of Lincoln); in Springfield, Ill. The Lincoln Herndon knew was an odd, thoughtful man ("the loveliest since Christ"), whose wife's temper was a town scandal and who brought his children to the law office where they "bent the points of all the pens, overturned inkstands, threw the pencils into the spittoon."

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