There was one space left on the Lake Como ferry at Gravedona, Italy, and a little blue Fiat slipped into it. But that left the vacationing Sheik of Kuwait in an awkward fix: his three-car caravan (including one blue Cadillac, one black Cadillac) was only two-thirds afloat. No smalltime bey-decker, His Highness Sir Abdullah as Salim as Sabah quickly offered the ferryboat captain $16 to unload the latecomer and make room for the royal limousine. The Milanese tourist in the Fiat bid $32 to preserve the status quo. The Sheik bid $160. The Italian raised him $160, promised the captain $320. Chips cascading from his shoulders, Abdullah said $1,600. But the ferryman thought that was not a fair sheik, refused to switch cars at any price. His Highness' motorcar had to queue, wait.

Chopping away with the matched set of woods and irons given to him last year by Fellow Golfer Ike Eisenhower, Japan's Premier Nobusuke Kishi finished well out of the yen in a Foreign Office-Foreign Diplomatic Corps tournament. With an old amateur's studied, off-day melancholy, Kishi brooded: "I just could not get going." With pro shop objectivity, the manager of the Sengokuhara Golf Course said: "Kishi seemed to be in his usual form."

In fragile health but still painting, Primitivist Grandma Moses passed a quiet 98th birthday at Eagle Bridge, N.Y.

British Mystery Writer Agatha Christie, 66, chugged up the sheer Acropolis, posed--looking not unlike her own fictional Miss Marple with bumbershoot and catchall--beneath the world's most spine-tingling marble slab: the entablature of the Parthenon.

A deadly wing shot and holder of his country's record for the largest tuna ever caught in Spanish waters, sportive Generalissimo Francisco Franco took to sea off the Galician coast near La Coruna in his harpoon-equipped yacht Azor, landed the ultimate prize in marine angling. The Jefe's catch: a 23-ton, 46-ft. sperm whale.

The superintendent of a private, exclusive Stockholm school announced the appointment of a new gymnastics teacher at $956 a year: Sweden's tall, trim Princess Birgitta, 21. Tumbling among her first pupils will be Crown Prince Carl Gustaf Folke Hubertus, 12, her brother.

In Hollywood, where no approaching stork goes long undetected by the heir-spotting magpies, Actor Pau! Newman and his Oscar-winning wife Joanne Woodward (The Three Faces of Eve) admitted it was true: face number three will arrive in April.

Entering Valley Forge Military Academy at Wayne, Pa., Plebe Simeon Rylski, 21, turned out for the 6 a.m. reveille, swept under his bunk, stood inspection, asked no special regard as Simeon II, exiled King of Bulgaria.

A British tourist from flopping hat brim to suede shoes, Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd--hung with beach robe, towel, goggles, slippers and a florid sports shirt--headed for the beach on Spain's Costa Brava.

In her house on Manhattan's unprepossessing West 103rd Street, Mrs. Fred Townley answered the telephone, gave up a small chunk of hard-won anonymity. Married for 25 years to a law-trained businessman, Miss America of 1922 and 1923--the only double winner of the contest--told Gossipist Earl Wilson that she was less than keen about a free trip to this year's rite at Atlantic City (see SHOW BUSINESS). Explained the former Mary Campbell: "I got so tired of the publicity I didn't ever want to hear about Miss America again." Pressed for her life story, the onetime Miss Ohio said: "I was pretty naive when I was starting. Mercy, I was", after all, only 15. I came home and told my mother, 'I was chosen Miss Columbus, and they said it's because of my figure. Mother, what's a figure?' My mother said, 'It's none of your business.' "

In CineMerlin Alfred Hitchcock's next motion picture, Actress Jessie Royce Landis plays a mother's role. The son: Cory Grant, who was a ten-month-old baby named Archie Leach when Jessie Royce was born on Nov. 25, 1904.

Arriving at Geneva's Hotel du Rhone as one of a U.S. congressional delegation to the atoms-for-peace conference (see SCIENCE), New York's Representative Ludwig Teller checked in minutes after Physicist Edward Teller--developer of the hydrogen bomb and no kin to Ludwig --checked out. Before long, people were asking the lawmaker some pretty steep questions. "Dr. Teller," someone inquired (and the title was right, too, because Congressman Teller is a J.S.D.), "how do you transfer magnetohydrodynamic motion to plasma particles without energy depreciation?" Glibly shaking off the fallout, Democrat Teller summoned counterploys learned on Capitol Hill--e.g., "The matter requires further study."

Married four years to Cineman's Man John Wayne, Peruvian-born Pilar Pallette was hunting around for own apartment. "Unfortunately," she said last week, business is sometimes more important to a man than his wife."

Answering a dusty question, Adlai Stevenson told reporters in Paris, "I shall not seek the nomination," then followed up the old response with a parable. Holocaust had obliterated life on earth, Adlai recounted, leaving one shook-up gorilla. Wandering hungrily on the ashen plains, the ape at length came upon a cave. In the cave was a beautiful lady gorilla, who purred: "We are the only two living beings on earth." "Lady," said the tired male, "have you got anything to eat?" From deep in the cave the lady gorilla brought forth a large, red apple. "Oh, lord," moaned the first gorilla, "let's not start that again."

Dispatching his personal barber, Britain's Admiral of the Fleet Louis F.A.V.N. Mountbatten, first Earl Mountbatten of Burma, put down a kinky situation. Crisis : the hair on the new wax Mountbatten at London's famed Madame Tussaud's museum was far too curly. The barber slicked down all but a single, suavely undulant wave.

Addressing a schoolteachers' meeting in Baltimore, Johns Hopkins' President Milton S. Eisenhower (TIME, Sept. 8) said that one reason U.S. educational standards are uncomfortably low is that some schools teach too much. "We know colleges that teach from 3,000 to 4,000 courses," he explained. Higher educational institutions should "cut the number of courses in half and concentrate on those they do with distinction. No college can be all things to all people."

Berrrand Russell was fit to be tied. "British authorities," he wrote to the Times of London, had committed a "gross discourtesy" by "subjecting a man of great intellectual eminence to insult at the hands of ignorant officials." The man: U.S. Nobel Prizewinning Chemist Linus Pauling, a colleague of Philosopher Russell in opposition to nuclear bomb tests. The Home Office--which considers that visitor non grata who takes part in meetings against government policy--had refused Pauling permission to stay in England < past Sept. 16, precluding his appearance before a meeting of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. What's more, said Russell, authorities at the airport had accused Pauling of lying when he claimed that he had an invitation in his baggage to speak before the Chemical Society of London. It was "McCarthyism . . . ignorant democracy . . . shocking."

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