'Twas the night of the ball We were tight, that was all ...

Cole Porter's fans never heard that lyric while he was alive. It was just one of those things he wrote for his Broadway musicals and filed away unused because he had another song he liked better. Now, six months after Porter's death at 71, his publisher, Dr. Albert Sirmay of Chappell & Co., has come on a trove of more than 100 Porter pearls stashed away in his Waldorf Towers Manhattan apartment. Dainty Quainty Me, Dizzy Baby, I Can Do Without Tea in My Teapot and dozens of others should spark the current Porter boom night and day for years. "There is enough material," beams Sirmay, "for half a dozen scores."

"Foolish!" barked NASA Manned-Flight Director Robert Gilruth. "I think maybe this will not happen again." Growled NASA Director James Webb, "This was not an adequate performance by an astronaut." Gemini Pilots Virgil Grissom, 38, and John Young, 34, were on the carpet for something they did on their recent three-orbit mission. Gilruth and Webb told a congressional committee that the corned-beef-on-rye sandwich Young smuggled into their Molly Brown capsule and fed Grissom instead of the scientifically prepared flight diet was strictly unprogrammed. Mincing no words, the administrators decreed that henceforth "corned-beef-sandwich incidents" will cease. O.K. But how about bagels in the lox?

Not since they put up Miss Liberty in the harbor had a woman charmed New York City with so few words. Protectively accompanied by diplomats and her lady in waiting, Denmark's tall (5 ft. 8 in.) Princess Benedikte, 21, whirled through a hectic six-day goodwill visit --her first trip to the U.S. At a ball celebrating Danish Week, she danced a quiet fox trot with her honor guard of four West Point cadets, and looked unflustered when she turned out to be taller than her official escort, Carl Michaelsen, president of the Danish American Society, Inc. Through it all she smoked filter-tip cigarettes, showed off a high-fashion wardrobe that she herself helped to stitch, regally declined to employ her fluent English for public speeches, and set a lovely example of how a world figure can win while being seen instead of heard.

Awards and prizes take up ten lines of his 32-line listing in Who's Who, and now Poet, Playwright, Professor, Author, Classicist and Critic Thornton Wilder, 68, had another line to add: the first $5,000 National Book Committee prize for literature. No less a fan than Lady Bird Johnson made the presentation at the White House. And she, after refreshing her memory by rereading some of his works, declared him just to her taste. He avoids "a dreary reliance on four-letter words," said the First Lady, and his marching, singing prose makes "the commonplaces of living yield the gaiety, the wonder and the vault of the human adventure."

"This will be a historical day. At 9:00 o'clock this morning, I must make a broadcast to the country announcing the German surrender. Isn't that some birthday present?" So wrote Harry S. Truman to his mother on his 61st birthday just 20 years ago. It was his 26th day as President of the United States. Celebrating the anniversary of that day this year at his annual birthday luncheon in Kansas City, Mo., Harry smilingly accepted a million-dollar pledge for the Truman Library Institute, where scholars study the history he made. But what really turned on his grin was a visit to Hello, Dolly! the night before. Stepping in front of the curtain, Leading Lady Mary Martin, 51, called out a special "Hello, Harry!" and got the whole audience to join her in singing "Happy Birthday."

The handsome, grey-haired woman from Prove, Utah, stood before a banquet gathering of 1,000 at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria and explained that youngsters "expect a little discipline" and need to be "held to certain ideals." She has the credentials to back up her comment. In 56 years of marriage, she and her engineer husband have seen their six children become a university president, a company vice president, a top corporation lawyer, a mathematician, a physicist, a housewife, and have themselves become grandparents 26 times over. Obviously such a brood exemplifies "family life at its very best," and so the American Mothers Committee, Inc., picked Lorena Chipman Fletcher, 76, from outstanding mothers across the country, proclaimed her 1965's "Mother of the Year."

Wouldn't all the Italian papers and the foreign wire services go for the news that Sophia Loren would play the role of Mother Cabrini in a new movie? They sure would--and did, when Carlo Ponti told them so. But last week the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the order that Mother Cabrini founded, showed it was just as adept at deflating phony publicity. "We feel very strongly," wrote Mother Ursula, president of Cabrini College, Radnor, Pa., "that Miss Loren is the worst possible choice to portray a holy woman." In the first place, there were "the bigamy charges." And secondly, her protest continued, "Sophia doesn't have the physique. Mother Cabrini was a small, slender woman. Miss Loren," Mother Ursula observed, "is bulky."

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