In 1958, he spent Christmas with U.S. troops in the Arctic, and now New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman, 74, was headed the other way, saying, "I don't want to slight the South Pole." He will spend Yuletide with the men assigned to U.S. Antarctic bases. It might be chilly, but the trip offers an unaccustomed bonus. Spellman will celebrate three Christmas Masses because of the international date line; a midnight Mass at McMurdo, then an 800-mile flight for a Christmas Day Mass at Byrd, and finally across the date line for another midnight Mass at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station. "I only hope," he said as he left, "that those whom I meet will be as happy to see me as I will be to see them."

A sad and sickly old man was coming home after five years of self-imposed exile over his Communist sympathies. Paul Robeson, 74, has not sung publicly in almost two years, has been living in a London nursing home, except for the last four months, when he was taken to East Berlin for what his far-leftist wife, Eslanda, described as "a medical examination." Now "he is to all intents and purposes retired," says Eslanda, who does practically all the talking. "He does not wish to see anyone or give any interviews. Nor does he wish to be photographed, because he has lost a lot of weight and is very self-conscious about being thin."

The rain in Spain may stay mainly in the plain, but the golf balls are likely to land anywhere--just like at home. Still, Rita Hayworth, 44, finds it a lot rougher on the set of Circus World, where she is playing a sawdust star on the skids. The cast has already survived a boat's capsizing in Barcelona, a flood while on location in Toledo, and is getting ready for the big tent-fire scene at Madrid's Retire Park. So she heads for the Club de Campo with her 18-19 handicap to bash the pill around when she gets to relax. The flaming red hair is strawberry-blonde now, and her film role casts her as the mother of Claudia Cardinale. But the erstwhile Sadie Thompson still has the gams to make shorts worth wearing.

June is for brides and December for polar bears. But the couple had already been waiting for three years because everybody thought they were too young. So the wind blew, the temperature dropped to 23DEG, and Actor Brandon de Wilde, 21, who played in The Member of the Wedding at seven, and Manhattan Deb Susan Margot Maw, 18, got married anyway. Then they headed south for a warming honeymoon, which meant that Susan was leaving her studies at Bryn Mawr, to say nothing of the holiday ball at which she was scheduled to debut.

Love and marriage? For five years Film Stars Romy Schneider, 25, and Alain Delon, 28, had one without the other. But last week Romy returned to their Paris apartment from Hollywood, and there, instead of Alain, was a bouquet of red roses and a note: "Ma cherie, je regrette."

Anyone can vote, and as many times as possible. The brewers report that the volume is so great that they don't even count the ballots--they weigh them. This year the heftiest pile of the lot belonged to Celeste Yarnall, a lissome, blue-eyed Hollywood hopeful from Long Beach, Calif., who beat out five other would-be beer queens to become the 25th Miss Rheingold. And what does she have to say? She likes golf, swimming, tennis, bowling, cooking, baking, painting, and she is looking for a man "who will share my interest in drama and the arts as well as a man with whom I can enjoy outdoor activities I find so necessary for relaxation." Sounds like a beer drinker, all right.

They said it would never fly when Orville and Wilbur Wright built the Kitty Hawk for $1,000 in 1903, but they were wrong. And they said it would never fly when volunteers finished a replica of the craft. This time they were right. The plane is destined to sit in the Wright Museum in Kitty Hawk, N.C., and so the engine has no pistons. It was built to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the first powered flight, and Astronaut John Glenn, 42, was on hand to see how it all started. The space program, he said, is no different from the Wright flight. "The basic purpose is exploration or curiosity. I feel the whole program would be worthwhile even if there were no Russia. Otherwise it would be like saying that Columbus shouldn't have tried unless he were in competition with the Chinese."

'Midst laurels stood: Archibald MacLeish, 71, named Amherst's poet in residence to succeed the late Robert Frost; Playwright-Producer Sir Tyrone Guthrie, 63, installed in the honorary post of chancellor of Queen's University in Belfast, succeeding Britain's late World War II strategist, Lord Alanbrooke; Poet and Critic Allen Tate, 64, awarded the $5,000 Chancie and William Booth Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets by a board of such peers as W. H. Auden and Randall Jarrell; Architect Le Corbusier (born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris), 76, promoted to grand officier, next to highest rank of France's Legion of Honor.

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