PEOPLE

How much atomic bomb power does the U.S. have? Too much, believes Major General John B. Medaris, recently retired chief of the Army's Ballistic Missile Agency. Medaris told an A.F.L.-C.I.O. World Affairs Manhattan meeting last week that "a prominent Senator" (who turned out to be Jack Kennedy) estimates that the U.S. already has an atomic stockpile equaling "ten tons of TNT for every man, woman and child on earth." World population: 2.8 billion.

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Off on another political hayride, Louisiana voters elected Guitarist-Composer James H. (You Are My Sunshine) Davis, 59, as their Governor for the next four years. But no sooner were the returns in than rumbles were heard from the direction of outgoing Governor Earl Kemp Long, 64. With some $7,500 in leftover "campaign contributions," Ole Earl has scheduled a statewide TV speech for May 8, two days before Democrat Davis takes office. Said Long: "Ah'll tell the people of things to come--and things not to come." Probable translation: barred by law from succeeding himself this time, Ole Earl expects to run for Governor again in 1964. Meanwhile, with his estranged wife Blanche holed up in Baton Rouge, Long was doing his homework in a New Orleans nightspot, where works his favorite houri, Stripper Blaze Starr.

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While Britain's Princess Margaret and her photographer fiance, Antony Armstrong-Jones, happily made plans for their honeymoon, a picture was going the rounds, making it seem that Tony had already been married to himself, about 70 years ago, and had a child, his spit and image. In fact, it was a trick photograph that Armstrong-Jones, posing as all three members of a proper Victorian family, had sent out as a Christmas card in 1954. All gags aside, irrepressible Margaret and Tony announced last week that they will honeymoon in the Caribbean on the royal yacht Britannia, which will sail a few hours after their wedding in Westminster Abbey on May 6.

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Italy's fever-eyed film queen Gina (Go Naked in the World) Lollobrigida prepared to become Canada's most glamorous immigrant of the year. Reason: she was weary of trying to untangle Italian red tape that prevented her stateless Yugo slavian-born husband, Dr. Milko Skofic, from becoming an Italian citizen. Father and son, 2 1/2-year-old Milko Jr., winged off with Gina from Rome on a trip that will end in Toronto, where the family will buy a home, hopefully apply for Canadian citizenship.

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After a year-long court fight, Texas Oil man W. Howard Lee, 51, fifth husband of ex-Cinestar Hedy (Ecstasy) Lamarr, 45, got a divorce, terminating what was, according to Lee, a most unecstatic six-year marriage. Hedy did not contest Lee's suit or his testimony that she had often belted him, reviled him, squandered his money, and accused him of swiping her jewelry. Day after the divorce, Hedy, gazing raptly at one of her own oil paintings (title: Chinatown), told newsmen that the marriage had gone bad because she had been too much a "mother" to Lee. Already getting $2,500 monthly in temporary alimony, Amateur Artist Lamarr settled for roughly $500,000 of Lee's cash and oil holdings -- making her more susceptible than ever to becoming the vic tim of the classically defined Hollywood heel: "The kind of man who would marry Hedy Lamarr for her money."

. . . Traveling to Toledo last January, Oregon's volatile Democratic Senator Wayne Morse delivered a lecture on labor legis lation to the Toledo local of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Last week Wayne Morse, the only Democratic Senator who voted against the Landrum-Griffin labor-reform bill last year, volunteered that he had collected a standard lecture fee, $500 and expenses, from the Teamsters for his Toledo talk. Then he made a fine distinction: the fee was paid by the local, not by International head quarters. Said Morse primly: "I wouldn't accept a fee from [Teamster Boss] Jimmy Hoffa."

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Alighting on U.S. soil in Seattle after an extended spell of world traveling, CBS Commentator Edward R. Murrow seemed awed by his person-to-person reunion with the small world. Allowed he: "I think as a result of my eight months of wandering about, I will talk with less assurance about world conditions -- or perhaps I should say 'less arrogance.' "

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When Showman Billy Rose offered $1,000,000 worth of his private sculpture collection to the Bezalel National Museum of Israel (TIME, Feb. 8), the offer was quickly accepted, and plans were made to display the 50-odd pieces on five acres of imaginatively landscaped grounds adjoining the museum in Jerusalem. But opposition to the gift soon came from Israels' ultra-Orthodox Agudat Israel Party, which protested that the planned display would be a profane violation of the Old Testament's canons against graven images. Pressured to withdraw the gift or shift the sculpture display to a city of less religious importance for Orthodox Jews, Rose threatened that unless the sculpture goes to Jerusalem as planned, he will cut off all of his gifts to Israel. But some Talmudic scholars sided with Rose, quoted Leviticus 26:1 to prove that statues are permissible so long as nobody worships them: Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image, neither rear you up a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in your land, to bow down unto it. . .

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A few years ago, high-domed U.S. thinkers liked to blame the nation's cultural deficiencies on conformity. Last week Adman Charles H. Brower, president of Manhattan's giant Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, trotted out another villain: "mediocrity." Speaking at a big advertising powwow in Florida, Brower declared that a lack of "greatness" is holding up national progress. He told his competitors: "Advertising in a climate of greatness will work harder. Fewer people will be annoyed by advertising . . . It will cease to be the whipping boy for every uninformed meathead and misinformed egghead and unsuccessful sorehead."

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Into print last weekend burst a pair of nonprofessional writers: Army 2nd Lieut. Peter Dawlcins, West Point's All-America halfback in 1958, now a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, and German-born Scientist Wernher von Braun, one of the top U.S. missile scientists. In The New York Times Magazine, Dawkins compared U.S. and British attitudes toward collegiate sports ("We Play to Win, They Play for Fun"). In This Week Magazine, Rocketeer von Braun presented Part One of a serialized novel titled Life on Mars. But professional writers needed to read only the leads and relax. Dawkins starts: "It is interesting indeed to investigate the different positions sport occupies in the lives of people of varying backgrounds and standards of living." Von Braun's beginning: "McKay sat easily in his seat on the flight deck, watching Bill Squire beside him at the controls of Goddard, the big rocket-nosed glider which had launched them from the expedition's cargo ship orbiting 620 miles out from the surface of Mars."

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Sick Comic Mort Sahl, 32, was beginning to sound as healthy as his earnings, now running to more than $300,000 a year. Sahl, who delights in proving that almost all popular heroes have clay heads to match their feet, owned up to some personal idols. On his list: Mark Twain ("a prism through which the young country expressed itself"), Herman Melville ("he had scope and virility, didn't internalize"), Tom Paine, Albert Einstein, Edmund Wilson, Theseus, George Bernard Shaw. Allowing that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was "a father figure" to him, Sahl said that he regards Dwight Eisenhower as "a stepfather figure."

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