The Army announced that Dreamboat Groaner Elvis Presley, now driving a Jeep for a platoon in an armored outfit in West Germany, was recently promoted from private first class to specialist fourth class. His $26.93 pay hike upped Millionaire Presley's total service salary (including overseas pay) to a cool $135.30 a month. But no sooner did Elvis put on his fancy new golden-eagle arm patch than an untoward infirmity, long predicted by his detractors, laid him low: his tonsils gave out. At week's end Soldier Presley was recovering from his throat infection, and doctors planned no surgery.

Early in Queen Victoria's long reign. Sir Benjamin Hall, her Chief Lord of Woods and Forests, promised Britain's Parliament "a king of clocks, the biggest and best in the world, within sight and sound of the heart of London." He kept his promise grandly. London's great Westminster clock was soon overseeing London's pace, keeping accurate time within a tenth of a second a day; one of its few respites from clockwork occurred in World War II when its works were shaken during a German air raid. One morning last week, when its hands stood at 11 o'clock and its sonorous bell, nicknamed Big Ben after Sir Benjamin, boomed the hour (in E below middle C), Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and other parliamentary dignitaries gathered to tender happy 100th anniversary greetings to Big Ben and its dependable companion.

Togged in a lady's outfit that could have triggered a riot in Japan a generation ago, comely Crown Princess Michiko took to a tennis court with Crown Prince Akihito in their first public sports outing since their marriage last April. She was paired with Akihito in a mixed-doubles match with other members of the Tokyo Lawn Tennis Club. Michiko displayed grace, stamina--and lace panties quaintly peeping out from under her "Michi-style" tennis suit.

Divorced by fourth wife Elaine last month in California, sawed-off (5 ft. 3 in.) Cinemugger Mickey (The Last Mile) Rooney, 38, whose matrimonial misadventures have set him back roughly $1,000,000 so far, sprang a few surprises that set even jaded old Hollywood buzzing. First off, Mickey casually let drop that he had divorced Elaine, by her leave, in Mexico last December. His fiancee-to-be, Barbara Thomason, 22, a sometime starlet, had gone along for the ride. Feeling free as an uncaged lovebird, Rooney married her on the spot. Then Mickey uncorked a real showstopper: Barbara expects a child around September's end. Elaine sidled back into the act to declare: "I won't feel I'm divorced from him until my California decree becomes final next year." Rumbled the judge who granted it: "I intend to look into the Mexican divorce and do whatever my legal duties call for." Said father-to-be (his fourth child) Rooney: "We're just elated that everybody in the world is put out by our happiness."

Ordinarily allotting little time to frivolity, France's austere President Charles de Gaulle unbent visibly at a benefit ball held under Justice Ministry auspices in Paris' Palais de Chaillot. Limiting his decorations solely to the Legion of Honor, Old Soldier de Gaulle smiled properly and offered affable greetings to Movie Luminaries Yul (The Sound and the Fury) Brynner, Sophia (The Black Orchid) Loren, Maurice (Count Your Blessings) Chevalier, William (The Bridge on the River Kwai) Holden, Cary (An Affair to Remember) Grant.

Palm Beach Matron Gregg Sherwood Dodge, 35, fifth wife of freewheeling Auto Heir Horace Dodge Jr., announced that she has raised $2.5 million in cash and pledges for "Girls' Town, U.S.A.," a haven to be built in southern Florida for "lost, frightened, abandoned girls from ten to 18 who need care and help." Gregg, a onetime chorus girl accused of adult delinquency in the past (charges of drunken driving, resisting arrest, slugging cops), made it clear that her nonsectarian, non-profit project is no transient whim. Said she soberly: "It would help to correct the alarming rate of violence and abandoned sex that we read of every day. I want to devote the rest of my life to this."

Wandering dazedly through New Jersey's port town of Perth Amboy, Shane O'Neill, 39, son of tormented Playwright Eugene O'Neill, proved to have torments of his own in the ill-starred family tradition. Hauled in by sympathetic cops, unemployed Family Man (four children) O'Neill, twice committed to public hospitals in the past for dope addiction, was carrying on him a large bottle of amphetamine pills, a prescription drug sometimes used by former addicts to curb their craving for stronger fixes. Rapped $55 for not having a narcotics user's identity card, he had only $1 and some small change to propitiate the law. The money to spring him after a night in jail was put up by Author Croswell Bowen. Shane O'Neill's collaborator on the current bestselling The Curse of the Misbegotten, a candid saga of the O'Neill family's tragic, repetitive journey into night.

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