During their nine years of marriage Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor have loved to fight. No one really took them seriously, however, and even when they tried acting mad, it wasn't always successful. Divorce His and Divorce Hers, their first TV movies, bombed badly (TIME, July 2). Yet there they were, visiting New York from Rome and announcing a separation. In a handwritten note to the press, Elizabeth said she and her husband had been in "each other's pockets constantly" and that she was convinced separation was a "good, constructive idea." She then flew with their adopted daughter, Maria, to Los Angeles. Meanwhile Richard put out his own press release. "I don't consider Elizabeth and I are actually separated. It's just that our private and professional interests are keeping us apart."

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"To be having a baby comes as such a surprise. It is contrary to all the technological advances of mankind," said the dumbfounded father-to-be, Actor Tony Perkins. His pregnant friend is Photographer Berry Berenson, sister of Actress Marisa Berenson and granddaughter of Designer Elsa Schiaparelli. At the moment, the couple, who have been living together since January in Tony's Manhattan apartment, have no definite wedding date. They want to "enjoy this unexpected pleasure first."

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"I am in love with another woman, Mrs. Jeanne Dorsey, and I intend to marry her," Governor Marvin Mandel, 53, of Maryland said in a statement that his press secretary read to reporters. There had been rumors, and specific denials by the Governor, about his romance with Mrs. Dorsey, a handsome, tall divorcee in her mid-thirties whose former husband is a Maryland state senator. Confronted with the latest news, Mrs. Mandel, 53, declared that she was "astonished, amazed and unbelieving. We shared the same bed for 32 years. As a matter of fact, we got out of the same bed this morning." She explained that her husband's job "must have got to him." She would stay in the Governor's mansion, she insisted, and "remain Mrs. Marvin Mandel."

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At 72, Baron Philippe de Rothschild -millionaire, writer, angel to the arts, superlative host, vintner -was the Frenchman with almost everything. After years of behind-the-scenes pressure, Rothschild received the appellation of premier grand cru for his family's Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, long regarded as one of the noblest red wines. The first official change in the sacrosanct 1855. classification of clarets puts Mouton-Rothschild in the select category of first-growth chateau wines, joining Haut-Brion, Latour, Margaux, and Lafite. Certain rare vintage bottles of Mouton-Rofhschild, with their elegant labels by such artists as Marc Chagall, and Henry Moore, were running as high as $8,500 a case at wine auctions, even before the new classification.

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The fashion industry has been touting the pleated skirts and white flannels of the "Great Gatsby Look" for months. The movie that started it all is now in its fourth week of filming, and the first stills are at hand. They show Robert Redford, as Jay Gatsby, in a World War I uniform and Mia Farrow, as Daisy Buchanan, in a long, white frilly gown. A more sophisticated look can be expected when the story moves on from their early love affair to Jay's lavish days as a mysterious millionaire in the early '20s. Although Scott Fitzgerald set his novel on Long Island, Paramount is shooting mostly in Newport, R.I. Jay's big house will be Rosecliff, a 40-room mansion designed in 1902 by Architect Stanford White. This gives some of the Newport bluebloods a chance to be extras -if they have the racy sporting look, casual arrogance and short haircuts called for by the casting director.

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With her patched blue jeans and her long hair, the visitor to Clairfield, Tenn., looks like any other teen-ager trying out her first summer job. Working on a film documentary about the history of Appalachian coal mining, Caroline Kennedy, 15, has been helping a federally funded film crew with camera work, interviewing and processing film. "You would never know she's the daughter of a President," said one Tennessee woman. "She goes up and down these mountains just like us other hillbillies." Ed Marlow of Clairfield, a miner who has been paralyzed from the waist down for 14 years as a result of a mine accident, remarked, "She's as pretty as a silver dollar. She's just plain folks." Miss Kennedy had thought it "super great" that he had a portrait-like tapestry of her father hanging near his bed.

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The romance began by mail. In a letter to the New York World in 1926, Gretchen Hood, a onetime opera singer, suggested that H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore journalist, misogynist and debunker of American mores, run for President of the U.S. Mencken wrote back declining the nomination ("How could I take an oath to support the 18th Amendment?"), but soon followed up her proposal with a 3 1/2-year courtship. It ended unexpectedly when the obdurate bachelor, then 49, suddenly married an English teacher at Goucher College. Now 86, Gretchen still has Mencken's 248 letters to her numbered and stashed away in her house in Washington, D.C. She admits that she wanted to marry him. "It would have been a real feather in my cap." But, she adds, "we never had any hanky-panky. I can't imagine Mencken making love to anyone. He was so mental all the time."

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Big family picnics are traditional on the Fourth of July. Still it was quite a gang that showed up for hamburgers and homemade ice cream at Bob Hope's two-acre place in Hollywood. In fact, Bob had to charter a bus to bring the 53 Cleveland Hopes and their in-laws from the airport to the house to begin their week's visit, which will include Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm. Hope footed the bill, but lamented: "If I could only claim them all on my income tax."

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