After a year as White House military adviser, General Maxwell Taylor, 61, was sworn in as new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A onetime proponent of a single chief for all the services, the old paratrooper now reserved his judgment. "I am not arriving," he said, "blueprint in hand as a crusader for change."

Her sister has 31 of them, but for Princess Margaret, 32, it was her very first royal equerry. He is Major Michael Patrick Andrew Mitchell, 34, a tall bachelor from the crack Coldstream Guards, who will serve as a surrogate squire for Meg at those endless official functions Husband Tony may prefer to miss.

The last time a Pope ventured onto a train was in 1863, when Pius IX rode a few bumpy miles southeast of Rome to bless a new railway line. But Pope John XXIII, 80, is no stay-at-home. Leaving the seldom used Vatican station at daybreak in the Italian government's presidential railroad car, he made a 400-mile whistle stop journey to Loreto and Assisi to pray for the success of the Second Vatican Council, convening in Rome this week. From the coach's window, he blessed huge crowds along the line and gave signs that he may become a comparative Vatican vagabond. "I especially like to travel by plane," the Pontiff told reporters. "You can see so much of the world in a short time. I hope it will not be another 100 years before a Pope takes this journey. I don't think it will, because I hope to travel more myself."

When the Old Vic repertory company toured Down Under early this year, New Zealand Beer Baron Sir Ernest Davis, 90, turned up at the Auckland theater for a gander at Actress Vivien Leigh, 48, playing Marguerite Gautier in Dumas' The Lady of the Camellias. So smitten was Sir Ernest with vibrant Vivien that he hurried backstage after the performance, wined and dined the cast, kept in touch by occasional long-distance phone calls when she returned to London, and on one occasion promised to remember her in his will. Last month Sir Ernest died--and his will was as good as his word. To Miss Leigh's astonishment, 35,000 shares of New Zealand Breweries Ltd., worth nearly $50,000, were listed in her name. "I had no idea it would be anything like this," she said.

Having toured the U.S. women's club lecture loop, British-born Ginette Spanier, directrice of Paris' Balmain fashion house, had a few words about American women yearning to be chic. "American women are so frightened about doing the wrong thing," she said, "and sometimes you can't blame them. There are so many fashion writers in America now that the poor dears are absolutely battered by waves of instructions. That's why when I speak to them, they seem to feel they're getting the God's honest truth. And they ask the most extraordinary questions: 'When do you wear a veil?' I tell them, 'It depends on what you've been doing the night before.' Seriously, I tell them mainly to relax. It's basically your attitude coming into a room that really counts."

Sharing the bill in the Broadway debut of Liz's estranged husband. Crooner Eddie Fisher, 34. was Frankie's ex-fiancee, South African Dancer Juliet Prowse, 26, who displayed vast areas of skin and even more gall. She pranced onstage as a barely garbed Joan of Arc and slithered her way through a song that pictured the saint as a call girl; then she turned up in some Egyptian gauze and launched into Cleo, the Nympho of the Nile, ending with a belly dance that would have fazed Farouk. Snorted one of the critics giving the show a universal pan: "Aside from getting 'A' for anatomy and 'E' for effrontery, Miss Prowse should do herself a favor: forget her career and take Frank Sinatra up on his marriage proposal."

With just three quarters of study needed to qualify for his bachelor's degree in Ohio State University's College of Commerce, burly Golfer Jack Nicklaus, 22, already assured of a $250,000 income in his rookie year as a pro, was all set to put aside his driver and hit the books. But the academic fairway proved full of traps. The school's dean ruled that because the U.S. Open champ was committed to three weeks of golfing exhibitions during the fall term, he must cancel them or withdraw; his instructors felt that he "could not miss that much class time." The edict riled Nicklaus. an insurance major with average grades. "I don't like to be told I can't go to school," he said. "I've missed classes to play golf every quarter I've been at Ohio State, and I feel I could meet my commitments and still do the required work."

Honored by the German Society for Photography, the world's foremost photographic organization: LIFE Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, 63. who returned to his native Germany for the first time in 27 years to accept a symbolic optical lens with an 18-carat gold rim and a $1.250 cash prize "as a photojournalist who has caught in pictures the world happenings and events of the last decades with rare feeling."

At his 22-room mansion in Providence, former Senator Theodore Francis Green, who retired last year as the oldest man ever to serve in the U.S. Senate, spent his 95th birthday sorting through stacks of greeting cards, gifts of German beer and vintage Rhine wines for his well-stocked cellar. Then, after a brief celebration with old friends, the venerable Green dictated a congratulatory birthday telegram to another Democratic patriarch: Arizona's Carl Hayden, 85, the oldest man now serving in the Senate.

Ill lay: Charles Laughton, 63, jowly, stentorian actor, spending his third month in a Hollywood hospital suffering from what his doctors now announce is cancer of the lower spine; Eleanor Roosevelt, 77, whose annual week-long checkup at a Manhattan hospital was extended for treatment of an infectious lung condition; Edward R. Murrow, 54, chain-smoking chief of the U.S. Information Agency, in a U.S. Army hospital in Teheran, Iran, with a "mild" case of pneumonia; Otto E. Passman, 62. congressional foe of foreign aid. who tripped over some plastic clothing bags in his Washington office and broke his left arm in four places.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.