Friday, Dec. 22, 1961

Ever since she came to Paris for a premiere in 1951, Italy's earthy Anna Magnani has lived, between films, in semiseclusion on the Left Bank. But for the glittering opening of the Lido's latest braless whizbang, Pour Vous, Anna made the Seine in the unlikely company of Shirley MacLaine. Though the moody Roman appeared to regard the proceedings with dyspeptic disdain, the eupeptic Shirley purred: "Miss Magnani was always one of my favorite actresses, and when we met in 1954, she became one of my favorite people." . . .

While his sister-in-law brought French cuisine to Washington, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy has added the salon. Corralling a coed group of New Frontiersmen (among them: Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver, Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric), Bobby last month set up weekly night-school seminars presided over by Presidential Aide (and ex-Harvard historian) Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and State Department Counselor (and ex-M.I.T. economist) Walt Whitman Rostow. Dubbed "Hickory Hill University" after Bobby's McLean, Va., estate, the seminars involve homework of one book a week, and Rostow, exercising a professor's traditional prerogative, promptly assigned his own Emergence of Nations. Equally promptly. Bobby's wife Ethel exercised a student's traditional right to complain. "Terrible books to read," she sighed. "Very heavy."

Despite his widely trumpeted salvation through psychoanalysis, the silver screen's golden boy still nursed at least one phobia. Heading home from Argentina, where he had been on location with the Cossack classic, Taras Bulba, Tony Curtis made it to Manhattan by slow boat and, buoyed by a bracing abrazo from Wife Janet Leigh, entrained for the long overland run to Hollywood. Reason for Curtis time-consuming travel plan: an aversion to flying.

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In Rangoon to return a 1955 state visit from Burma's Prime Minister U Nu, Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion, 75, embarked upon a program unlikely to win cheers from rigidly orthodox religious leaders back in Jerusalem. Once the demands of protocol had been discharged, the patriarch of the Jewish homeland intended to indulge a longtime fascination with Buddhism by making a ten-day contemplative retreat at the home of U Nu, himself a Buddhist monk. Meantime, livening up the diplomatic garden parties, Ben-Gurion wowed his hosts by showing up attired like a potbellied pixy in Burma's traditional gaungbaung headgear and silk sarong. Chortled the Israeli leader: "Now I know what the Scots wear under their kilts."

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It was a time for all uncommonly good men to come to the aid of the Republican Party in Colorado. Convinced that the G.O.P. would have carried the Colorado house of representatives last year "if one candidate hadn't shot himself up in a hunting accident and if [Rocky Ford Candidate] Anne Thompson hadn't withdrawn at the last minute when she found she was to become a mother," go-getting State Republican Chairman Jean K. Tool, 41, proclaimed his intention to extract from all future candidates a pledge "to give up hunting during the campaign and to refrain from activities that might lead to pregnancy."

The mills of bureaucratic justice at the Federal Aviation Agency grind somewhat slower than Mach 2--but sure. Onto the agency's docket for "careless" piloting went none other than the FAA Administrator himself, ex-Navy Jet Jockey Najeeb Halaby, 46, who a month ago grazed a United Air Lines Viscount while taxiing out of Washington's National Airport. Squeaked one of the mice in charge of chasing the cat: "The case is being processed in the same way as for any airman."

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Though no Western government, including that of Konrad Adenauer, supports nuclear armament of West Germany outside of NATO control, Touring Lecturer Eleanor Roosevelt, 77, cast a shrill chill over a Temple Israel audience in Long Beach, Calif., by proclaiming that the very thought of atomic weapons in German hands "terrifies me. Eighty per cent of West Germany's officials are ex-Nazis. They say none of them liked Hitler, but every day people go over to that now empty bunker [where der FUehrer died] and stand . . ." Unnoted by Mrs. Roosevelt was the fact that Hitler's old bunker is behind the Communist wall in East Berlin.

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"Rather touched" when a British stripling agreed to defend him in a school debate over which of four prominent men should be jettisoned to save a sinking balloon, Billionaire U.S. Oilman J. Paul Getty promptly supplied his paladin with a suggested brief. Unaware that his hypothetical fellow travelers were to be Fidel Castro, British Playwright John Osborne and Philosopher-Demagogue Bertrand Russell, Getty wrote: "I am only 13 stone [182 Ibs.] and therefore probably lighter than the rest. If there are other millionaires there, I'm probably the youngest at 68, so the oldsters should go." Finally came the hard sell: "I probably pay more taxes in more countries than anyone in the world."

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