Long bemused by tennis-playing amazons ("Pam, I adore you, Pam, you great big mountainous sports girl"), Britain's bestselling Poet John Betjeman, 55, lit out for Australia in November all clutched up: "I could not write and was afraid to try; I felt I was finished." But last week, back in London again, Latter-Day Victorian Betjeman felt himself once more summoned by belles. "Australia," he glowed, "is a wonderful country with a wonderful future, magnificent oysters and wines, and athletic girls of the type I like best--with long hair and legs, and turned-up noses."
"This business of being single," decided Billy Rose not long ago, "is like a big red and gold candy box which, when opened, has two lousy bonbons in it." Last week, fleeing the candy box, the retired Enfant Terrible of Broadway, now 62. took time off from filling out his collection of A.T.&T. shares (with 80,000, worth roughly $11 million, he is now the company's second biggest stockholder) to swell his collection of marriage licenses to four. For his latest fling at matrimony, Billy chose a familiar partner: ex-Showgirl Joyce Mathews, 42. to whom he was previously married from 1956 to 1959. (His first two wives: the late Fanny Brice and Big Dipper Eleanor Holm.) For Joyce, even a nuptial doubleheader was no novelty, two of her four earlier flounces to the altar having been made with Milton Berle.
"Under Secret Service guard," read a breathless report from the Associated Press. "Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy slipped out of Palm Beach last night and for an hour and a half danced the 'Twist' in a Fort Lauderdale nightclub." Within hours, livid Presidential Press Secretary Pierre Salinger set the wires burning again with the charge that the story "was a cheap effort by a nightclub owner to use the First Family for publicity purposes," and A. P. President Benjamin McKelway was servicing a wordy personal apology to Jackie. Cause of all the hubbub: a zingy Jackie-lookalike, Stephanie Laye Javits, socialite wife of the nephew of New York's Republican Senator Jacob Javits, had been undulating at the Golden Falcon, near Pompano Beach. Shrugged Steffi: "I don't know what I can do about it; I have to be me. I've been me as long as she's been Jackie, and I don't imagine either one of us is going to change much now."
As he prepared to wind up 44 years of naval service with a final piping over the side this week, Admiral Charles ("Cat") Brown, 62, retiring Commander in Chief of Allied Forces, Southern Europe, already had a new mission in view: establishing a European beachhead for St. Louis' jet-and missile-making McDonnell Aircraft Corp. Working out of Paris, the Navy's salty "Grey Eagle"* will peddle the successors to the fighter craft he began piloting back in 1924 as a roistering junior officer on the first U.S. aircraft carrier, the old Langley.
When she decided to add a zoo to the attractions of her nightclub outside the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, Katherine Dunham, 51, did not forget her role as an avowed devotee of the serpentine voodoo god Damballa. Among her first specimens, the Chicago-born folk dancer imported from the U.S. an innocuous reptile quartet consisting of an emerald-green tree boa, a king snake, an African ball python and a bull snake. As the news spread, her Haitian neighbors, who feel less cozy about Damballa's earthly manifestations, all but went amok. Shrilling that four fat pythons had escaped and that the head of a devoured man had been found in the area, Haiti's radio and press fanned hysterical rumors that Hispaniola was on the verge of being taken over by snakes. Sighed Miss Dunham, who found herself under police surveillance barely three years after she had been awarded Haiti's Order of Honor and Merit: "Someone wants this propaganda to have an effect on my business. It's pretty convenient if you want to get rid of someone."
Emerging from a Santa Monica court hearing over custody of their three-year-old son, Christian Devi, sometime Actress Anna Kashfi, 26, without warning hauled off and landed a resounding slap on the face of ex-husband Marlon Brando, 37.
Brando, who had announced that he was "tired of always playing the heavy" after hearing Anna enthusiastically offer to fill the court in on his alleged moral short comings, adroitly ducked a second blow and high-tailed it out of the courthouse, his Mutiny on the Bounty hairdo bobbing indignantly. Shrilled Miss Kashfi, whirling on a surrounding bevy of photographers: "Don't ever say I didn't give you a good picture."
As his fellow Socialists angrily denounced Britain's right-wingers for their sneers at U.N. policies in Katanga and Goa, Laborite M. P. Richard Grossman prudently recalled a warning delivered during the 1956 Suez crisis by the late Left-Wing Firebrand Aneurin Bevan. Nye's dictum: "There is no reason why in attacking the Tories we should commit ourselves to the view that all United Na tions decisions must be accepted. There is only one motto worse than 'My country, right or wrong,' and that is 'the United Nations, right or wrong.'"
Stealing away from the Christmas Eve hubbub to bag a few partridges on the grounds of Madrid's El Pardo palace, Spain's Generalissimo Francisco Franco, 69, had fired off some 40 shots when the left barrel of his British Purdey suddenly exploded. "It is a matter of little importance," shrugged the icy-veined old soldier, surveying his bleeding left hand. "Give me a handkerchief to tie it up." The Caudillo seemed unfazed by the fact that had he been sighting along the horizon instead of upward over his head, the explosion might well have caught him in the face. Less stoically, shaken aides hustled the protesting Generalissimo off to a Spanish air force hospital for his first in-patient treatment since 1916, when Riff rebels wounded him in the stomach in Spanish Morocco. At the hospital, Spain's top surgeons removed fragments of Franco's gun and shooting glove from his hand, saved his badly torn index finger. Three days later, despite continuing pain, the portly chief of state was back in the palace, polishing up his year-end broadcast to his subjects.
Having been elegantly introduced to Washington society fortnight ago (TIME, Dec. 29), Diane ("Dede") Buchanan, 18, captivating daughter of former State Department Protocol Chief Wiley Buchanan, last week bestrode the world. Occasion : Manhattan's glittering seventh annual International Debutante Ball, where Dede as official U.S. representative joined an Annapolis escort in a shoeless demonstration of a U.S. folk dance that De Rham never taught.
After a quiet Christmas week at home in Arlington, Va., with his wife Anna and their children -- John, 15, and Caroline, 13 -- Astronaut John H. Glenn Jr., 40, returned to the powder-blue crew quarters of Cape Canaveral's Hangar "S." There, one floor below in glassed-off splendor, glistened the Mercury capsule that at midmonth is scheduled to carry the lean Marine lieutenant colonel on three orbits of the earth. As the sobersided ex-test pilot buckled down to his monastic, preflight regimen, his wife and kids decided to wait it out in Virginia. Said Anna Glenn: "We've had a wonderful Christmas -- our very best. There's an awful lot to look forward to, you know."
* Navalese for the officer with the most active-duty time as an aviator.
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