Married. Sophia Loren, 31; and Carlo Ponti, 52; in a civil ceremony in Sevres, France, that presumably makes them legally man and wife, after a decade of legal maneuvering and bigamy charges in Italy. He solved the problem by becoming a French citizen, thus validating his Mexican divorce.

Married. David Susskind, 45, TV's open end; and Joyce Davidson, 35, onetime Toronto TV commentator; both for the second time; in Arlington, Va.

Died. Sepp Dietrich, 73, prewar head of Hitler's SS bodyguard and general in command of the Sixth Panzer Army at the Battle of the Bulge, who on Dec. 17, 1944, ordered the massacre of 86 U.S. prisoners in Malmedy, Belgium; of a heart attack; near Stuttgart.

Died. Joseph E. Ridder, 80, chairman of Ridder Publications, a multimillion-dollar chain of 24 newspapers (Journal of Commerce, St. Paul Pioneer Press), run by a family dynasty, whose successes allowed him to indulge his love of sports, as he put more than $100,000 into the Minnesota Vikings football team and $750,000 into the yacht Constellation in 1964, when it successfully defended the America's Cup; of uremia; in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Died. Roger D. Lapham, 82, businessman-politician who in the 1930s, as president of the American-Hawaiian Steamship line, won the grudging respect of Harry Bridges' West Coast dockers for his tough, fair-minded negotiations, a quality that helped him as mayor of San Francisco (1944-48), where he successfully cleaned out entrenched machine politics, but failed to secure for the city the permanent location of the U.N.; after a fall; in San Francisco.

Died. Sir Ernest Gowers, 85, British civil servant, who served for 60 years in every capacity from Lloyd George's secretary to London civil defense chief in World War II, known in the U.S. as the rhetorician who slew the dragon of verbosity, first with his bestselling plea for simple language, Plain Words (1954), and last year for his revision of the classic Fowler's Modern English Usage, which preserves its original charm; of cancer; in Midhurst, Sussex.

Died. Vaino Tanner, 85, longtime leader of Finland's 100,000-member Social Democrats, an intense nationalist who for half a century steadfastly resisted Russia's interference in his country, so infuriating the Kremlin that in 1946 Stalin had him jailed and twelve years later Khrushchev insisted that Social Democrats be kept out of the government, an injustice remedied last month when the party swept back into power; after a long illness; in Helsinki.

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