Booked into Montreal's high-tariff El Morocco nightclub, the four singing sons of aging (55) Groaner Bing Crosby soon found close harmony impossible. Their price tag was $12,500 for a week, but they only lasted three days. They bought their way out of their contract. It all seemed to have something to do with a case of Scotch in their dressing room. Gary, 26, oldest of the quartet, says he lost his voice, but regained it long enough, during the boys' final set, to call a ringside lady "a drunken bum." Cutting the act very short, the lads fled back to their dressing room, where they bloodied Gary's nose and otherwise clouted him for crabbing the routine. After the bout, Gary rested briefly, then plodded to a nearby bar, expressing a simple sentiment about his hard-knuckled brothers: "I made them, and I can break them." At week's end, Montreal Wrestling Promoter Eddie Quinn, a part owner of El Morocco, reasoned that the Crosby combo had been booked all wrong to begin with. He offered them a good deal for a tag-team grappling match in a local arena next month, figuring that a two-against-two skirmish "might be fairer."

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Not since he stepped down as Britain's Prime Minister more than four years ago had Sir Winston Churchill made any utterance in the House of Commons. But one afternoon last week both sides of the House rose to cheer Churchill as he shuffled to his accustomed seat. It was his 85th birthday. After hearing congratulations from Labor Leader Hugh Gaitskell and Tory House Boss R.A. ("Rab") Butler, the old man rose slowly to break his long parliamentary silence. His speech in full: "May I say I accept most gratefully and eagerly both forms of compliments." Afterward, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill celebrated the anniversary at their Hyde Park Gate home, which they had fled a day earlier to avoid getting underfoot while the chef and a platoon of servants were scurrying about while manning their party stations.

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Cuban Sculptor Joseph Dubronyi, who has hewn enough nudes to people a colony, was about to sue the estate of "a good pal," the late Cinemactor Errol Flynn, for $5,000. The unpaid-for art object: a goldplated, 18-in. reclining figure of Flynn's last protegee, lithe Nymphet Beverly ("Woodsie") Aadland, 17, in the breathtaking altogether.

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One of the Orient's most thoroughly kicked political footballs, Henry Pu Yi, 53, got his freedom from the Chinese Reds after more than a decade as their "war prisoner." Last Emperor of China's Manchu dynasty, thick-spectacled Pu Yi reigned briefly as a child before losing his throne in China's 1911 republican revolution. Quarter-century later, the Japanese set him up as puppet Emperor of Manchukuo, but he again got the boot when World War II's end brought the defeat of his sponsors.

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Possibly the most urbane and tart-tongued lady in Hollywood, sometime Cinemactress Pamela (The Upturned Glass) Mason, 43, assessed movieland society as of today: "There are so few single people left in town, all the parties are attended by married couples who don't want to be together in the first place. The men gather in one corner and play cards, when possible. The wives all want to dance, no matter what their age, but nobody wants to dance with them."

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Teetotaling, nonsmoking Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, topflight dignitary of the Church of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), was ushered with his entourage to a ringside table in the posh Blue Room of Washington's Shoreham Hotel. He was no sooner seated than the most durable French singer ever to come from Milwaukee, "the incomparable" Hildegarde, began picking on him. Benson refused to join her for a sip of pink champagne in her big novelty number, but later, pressured by her into naming his favorite song, he admitted into a microphone that it is When It's Springtime in the Rockies. Gasped Hildegarde: "That one I don't know!" Near week's end, embattled Ezra Benson went off to Walter Reed Army Hospital for a gall-bladder operation, was recuperating nicely.

In Paris, glamorous Grandma Marlene Dietrich was packing them; in at the Theatre de l'Etoile, flinging her celebrated gams and singing sultry songs that hark all the way back to her first starring movie, The Blue Angel. On her opening night she got a fervent embrace from an old (70) friend, France's busy-busy Jack-of-All-Arts Jean Cocteau.

A onetime army football team manager (West Point '03), General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, 79, descended from his aerie in Manhattan's Waldorf Towers to go to the Waldorf's grand ballroom, got the National Football Foundation's Gold Medal Award "in recognition of a lifetime of devotion" to the college sport. Warming to an occasion as he seldom has in years, MacArthur trotted out some of his own football yarns, plus a quip or two. Recalling a Harvard-Yale contest that he attended as aide-de-camp to Harvardman Theodore Roosevelt, the general quoted T. R.: "Douglas, I'd rather be in the Harvard backfield than in the White House!" He remembered how Woodrow Wilson had once wished aloud that the Army-Navy game might be staged in some international arena: "It might serve a better purpose than the League of Nations." Of Harry Truman, who fired him from his Far Eastern command post in 1951, MacArthur uncorked a wry observation: "The way he kicked me out of the Army, he must have thought he was a pretty good fullback!"

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