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Two Manhattan producers announced that they will soon try the onerous feat of bringing a lusty chunk of the stream of consciousness of Author James Joyce to Broadway. Their dramatic selection: the "Nighttown" portion of Joyce's phantasmagoric Ulysses, covering three hours in a Dublin bordello, most of it originally set down by Joyce in playscript form. Hard to read, harder to act, impossible to stage with its own wild flavor intact because of obvious censorship obstacles, "Nighttown" is bound to keep playgoers consulting not only programs but probably interpretive texts carried into the theater by the bushel and read by match-light. Sample of the brothel-born maunderings of Ulysses' protagonist Leopold Bloom: "I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then tomorrow as now was be past yester ... I stand, so to speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general postoffice of human life [feeling] a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle ..." The producers may also have trouble with some of the animal actors (including an egg-laying rooster) called for in Joyce's script. Sample stage direction: The bulldog growls, his scruff standing, a gobbet of pig's knuckle between his molars through which rabid scums pit tie dribbles. ... More than 1,000 Social Registerites and hangers-on clanked, rustled and jangled into Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to feel real regal at the annual Imperial Ball, sponsored for charity by Chrysler

Corp. and boasting a stage show that glittered with some $10 million worth of borrowed jewelry. Some costumed lady guests were marvels to behold, but none greater than the international set's large-hearted partygiver, Elsa Maxwell, 73, bedecked with such garnish as one of the world's biggest rocks (a 337-k. sapphire) in her guise of Russia's Empress Catherine the Great. Also gone regal was Metropolitan Opera Soprano Maria Meneghini Callas, playing her greatest nonsinging role as Hatshepsut, an 18th Dynasty Queen of Egypt. Prattled Columnist Maxwell just before the ball: "Maria and I, gentle as ewe lambs, will be side by side in the Parade of Empresses. What an amusing ending to one of my greatest 'feuds.' "* ... A Paris court ruled that the public sale of an unexpurgated, 28-volume set of the complete works of the Marquis de Sade (TIME, Dec. 31) was an "outrage to morality." Paris Publisher Jean-Jacques Pau-vert, who had rashly tried to peddle "to specialists" the marquis' encyclopedia of all-out sadism, was let off with a $571 fine and a court order dictating that every last page of the pornography involved be destroyed.

A farewell banquet was accorded Financier John Hay Whitney, U.S. Ambassador-designate to the Court of St. James's, at the Long Island estate of his sister, Joan Whitney Payson, co-owner with Whitney of the famed Greentree Stable. Next day, in a Manhattan hospital recovering from gastric ulcer surgery, the diplomat-to-be's wife, Betsey Gushing Whitney, heard a special tape recording of the tributes paid her husband at the dinner. Among the notable banquet guests: CBS Board Chairman William S. Paley and high-styled Barbara Gushing Paley, Long Island Newsday Publisher Alicia Patterson, Broadway Producer Richard Halliday and his musicomedienne wife Mary Martin, retiring G.O.P. National Committee Chairman Leonard W. Hall (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), New York's freshman Republican Senator Jacob K. Javits, New York Herald Tribune President-Editor Ogden R. Reid, TV Comic Sid Caesar.

In the Kremlin's glittering Hall of St. George, Celestine Bohlen, 6, daughter of U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R.. Charles E. ("Chip") Bohlen, joined some 2,000 kiddies in celebrating the Russian Christmas season. They howled and clapped for acrobats, singers and magicians, then met a bearded gentleman strongly resembling Santa Claus but introduced himself as Grandfather Frost. He led the children around a towering evergreen that looked exactly like a Christmas tree but, in the parlance of atheistic Communists, was disguised under the tinkly title of "New Year's tree."

...

Wisconsin's retrogressive Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy hove out of political limbo on ABC's TV Press Conference to try a comeback by his usual method, namely, whittling others off at the temples to make himself look like a larger dwarf. On Joe's current "dangerous" list: White House Assistant Sherman Adams, U.S. Delegate to the U.N. Paul Hoffman ("a throwback on the human race"), Presidential Disarmament Adviser Harold E. Stassen (a Stevensonite who "goes further" than Adlai), and the President's brother, Milton Eisenhower ("no more a Republican than ... a Hottentot"). Then McCarthy shot his real bolt of news: he. 47, and his pretty wife Jean have adopted a five-week-old baby girl, their first. Is Joe sick, on the verge of resigning from the Senate? Declaring his candidacy for re-election in '58, the Senator offered to lace on "eight-ounce gloves," take on anyone who believes he is flagging.

Boston's famed Heart Specialist Paul Dudley White, 70, an energetic mountain climber, wood splitter, bicycle rider and whale hunter (to take their pulses), welcomed a snowstorm to help demonstrate one of his favorite maxims: "Hard work never killed a healthy man." Unpuffingly shoveling snow piled behind his Beacon Street office, Dr. White advised all healthy folks to take exercise in keeping with their age and general physical tone, build up to exertion slowly if they're soft, certainly not refrain from snow shoveling if their only ailment is just being 70. Said the doctor with some concern: "We are already becoming a soft race dependent on gadgets which are not likely to protect our youth from the chief hazards of tomorrow."

A Manhattan sightseer, New Hampshire's earthy Novelist Grace Metalious, 32, whose sex-gorged Peyton Place (TIME, Sept. 24) has stood No. 1 on the nation's bestseller lists for almost two months, counterattacked censors and all who would ban her barnyard portrayal of a rampageous U.S. hamlet. Cried plumpish Authoress Metalious, mother of three: "I know about small towns. A rock in a field may look firm, but kick it over and you'll find all kinds of things crawling underneath. Too much sex? How can you write a novel about normal men and women, let alone abnormal ones, with no sex in the plot? We all had a mother and father! Even Tom Sawyer had a girl friend!"

* After the ball, Elsa, though granting she panned Maria's use of her larynx at her Met opening, heartily rasped that the "feud" was all "a joke."

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