Waifs, Whiffs, Etc.

P: Two sequined waifs showed up in Philadelphia's Orphans' Court. Singer Frankie Avalon, 19, said his guardian needed approval to spend $12,373 from the kid's estate for assorted expenses. The inimitable Fabian, 16, needed $38,392. It costs a lot of wampum to be Fabian, his guardian explained. He can't go to school (girls scream and wail as he walks down the corridors), so he has to pay two private tutors $10 an hour. Moreover, the Fab is taking singing lessons that are worth like 60 years of analyst's fees.

P: Representative Oren Harris' House investigating subcommittee hired a new staff secretary, Mrs. Elizabeth G. Paola (pronounced payola).

P: Following the fantastic international temblor of drum beating, which caused Stanley Kramer's On the Beach to open simultaneously in 18 cities, including Melbourne, Moscow, London, Paris, Tokyo and Washington, the drums are now being carried right into the jungle. To Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Lambarene, Gabon Republic (French Equatorial Africa) went a special 16-mm. print of On the Beach for his 80th-birthday celebration this week.

P: In Chicago, four weeks after the competing AromaRama opened in New York, Mike Todd Jr. finally uncorked his own Smell-o-Vision film. Something less than an attempt to go around the world in 80 whiffs, Scent of Mystery is a whodunit that lacks coherent narrative, is little more than a pastiche of festival scenes, falls on its nose.

P: In Tuskegee, Ala., birthplace of Tuskegee Institute (for Negroes), the Macon Theater had the last word in separate but equal cinema. The separate ticket offices, separate entrances, and separate concessions were old as midnight popcorn, but there was an added feature: a ceiling-to-floor partition, running down the middle of the auditorium. There were 324 seats on the white side and 336 seats on the colored side. Up front: two separate but equal silver screens.

P: Hugh Carleton Greene, 49, brother of Novelist-Playwright Graham Greene, took over as director general of the British Broadcasting Corp., replacing 60-year-old Sir Ian Jacob. Going from Oxford to Fleet Street in 1933, Carleton Greene was a Daily Telegraph correspondent until 1940, when he joined BBC to wage psychological warfare. BBC staffers are confident that their new 6 1/2 ft. "D.G." is the man to hold up the BBC side in 1964, when the BBC's charter and the mandate of the ITV commercial network both expire.

P: Two famed TV shows, Ford's coast-to-coast Star time and WNTA's New York-area Play of the Week, found their material last week in old Broadway melodramas about psychopathic killers (scarf-strangling variety). On a $38,000 budget Play of the Week presented a chilling, full-length production (two hours) of Alexander' Knox's The Closing Door, excellently played by Dane Clark and Kim Hunter. With some $200,000, NBC's Startime presented Audie Murphy in an hour-long condensation of Mel Dinelli's The Man, worked up little interest and no suspense. Meanwhile, pointing a TV moral, Producer Hubbell Robinson went on feasting on his overall $15 million budget for 39 Startime hours, but WNTA's Play of the Week was fighting for its life. Despite its record of first-rate drama (TIME, Dec. 14), Play of the Week is not finding enough sponsor support and may soon disappear.

P: Chicago TV Manufacturer Ulises A. Sanabria (deForest receivers) took an ad in the Sun-Times to say that it is "unAmerican and unsportsmanlike" for other set manufacturers to market remote control gadgets that make it easy for a TV viewer to kill the sound when a commercial goes on the air (some 2,500,000 "blab-offs" are now in operation in the U.S.). Adding that the public ought to be grateful to the advertisers who pay for the shows, Sanabria included coupons for people to send to their Congressmen, urging that all remote control cutoffs be outlawed.

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