What do Truman Capote, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Barbara Hutton have in common? Answer: things have been working out fine for them. Sort of. Writer Capote, now finishing his high-society novel Answered Prayers, didn't have a prayer in a Southampton, L.I., court last week, when he pleaded guilty to a drunken-driving charge. He was fined $165 and ordered to enroll in a state-run driver-rehabilitation program. Nobel Prizewinning Author Solzhenitsyn and Wife Natalya have learned Western ways too fast. She was at the wheel of their van when a Kansas highway patrolman pulled her over for doing 76 in a 55-m.p.h. zone. But no jail awaited Natalya or the startled author of The Gulag Archipelago. Instead, they received a brisk lecture on traffic customs, U.S. style, and a $25 fine. Hit hardest was Woolworth Heiress Barbara Hutton, who was assessed $800 in Mexico last week after she failed for the past two months to pay the wages (a total of $640 per week) of the 20 gardeners and grounds keepers at her home in Juchi-tepec. Maybe she just forgot: she is never there.
"To act this way is a refreshing and salutary experience," says Yves Montand. No wonder. Of late, he has been assassinated in Z, tortured in The Confession and kidnaped and murdered in State of Siege, but in the comedy he is now filming in Italy, Le Grand Esco-griffe (an exuberant man too clever for his own good), Montand is permitted the luxury of survival. "This comedy is sublime," he says. Ridiculous, too: the hopelessly ill-fated kidnaper-star ends up stuck with the kidnapee.
Should she be troubled by a pea under her mattress--like the sensitive maiden in the fairy tale--Princess Anne of England, 25, will probably have to remove it herself, at least while she resides in the Olympic Village at Bromont, Quebec, 45 miles from Montreal. As one of the 21 members of Britain's equestrian team, Anne requested that she receive no special treatment, and she isn't getting any. She lives in a three-bedroom apartment with six other athletes, including her husband, Captain Mark Phillips, an alternate member of the team; she stands on line for meals in the cafeteria; she rides in the bumpy shuttle bus from the village to the stables two miles away. All security is so tight at the Games that Anne's presence has required no additional measures. Says one equestrian official: "You can hardly breathe for the armed guards. Anne could invite Queen Elizabeth to stay overnight and we wouldn't have to increase the security." Like it or not, the princess still gets some uncommon attention. Confesses a village authority: "The first time I saw her having breakfast in the cafeteria, I whirled around so fast I nearly dumped my tray all over the Australians."
The brown hair, the blue eyes, the stunning figure (34-25 1/2-35 1/2) are reasons enough to watch carefully Rina Messinger, 20, winner last week of the Miss Universe contest in Hong Kong. One other reason: Messinger, on leave from an Israeli premilitary training corps, might be a tempting target for terrorists. Extensive precautions were being taken as she began her world tour with a stop in Bangkok. The first Miss Israel ever to win the crown, Messinger did not exactly put security agents' minds at ease when answering the contest question: Which country would she most like to visit? Her immediate response: "An Arab one."
Dwight D. Eisenhower "is in danger of being ossified," according to his grandson. "He once said, 'Don't let them put me on a horse,' " David Eisenhower recalls, "but I'm afraid that's what has been happening." Now out of law school, David, 28, has decided to try to rescue his grandfather from bronze-statue status. He plans to write a biography of the general and President that will reveal Ike, in the author's words, "as a colorful and complex man." So far, David has written the title--Going Home to Glory: Dwight David Eisenhower--but not much else; basic research, including the study of some unpublished Eisenhower papers, won't be completed for at least eight months. David does not plan to rely heavily on his own impressions. Says he: "In my teens I hardly knew him--only as a stern disciplinarian."
They wanted her on graduation day, but Ella Fitzgerald, 58, couldn't make the date. So, "since she couldn't come to commencement," explained a Dartmouth College official, "commencement came to her." When Miss Ella stopped in Hanover, N.H., last week to give a previously scheduled concert, Dartmouth arranged a special ceremony to confer upon jazz's first lady of song an honorary doctorate of humane letters. "Musical styles have changed many times in the last 40 years," the citation read, "but Ella Fitzgerald is always the height of style... The range of [her] repertoire is truly astounding. It has been said [she] could sing a telephone book and make it sound good." The crowd of 3,000 got no wrong numbers from Ella, who did a cool Hustle in the middle of her hottest song, Ease on Down the Road. After the show, Ella was asked for her autograph. She signed with pleasure: "Dr. Ella Fitzgerald."
As usual, he called the tune. Three months before the wedding was supposed to take place, Frank Sinatra, 60, risked his fourth walk up the aisle, this time with ex-showgirl Barbara Marx, age 40 plus a few, previously the wife of Marx Brother Zeppo. The scene was Sunnylands, the 1,000-acre Palm Springs oasis of Walter Annenberg, millionaire publisher and former Ambassador to Great Britain. Gentlemen were requested to wear neckties, an unusual formality in Palm Springs, and guards manned the gates of the Annenberg' estate to keep uninvited admirers at bay in the 120DEG heat. Among the 120 guests: Republican Presidential Hopeful Ronald Reagan and his wife; Mr. and Mrs. Spiro T. Agnew; Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Peck; Rosalind Russell; and Freeman Gosden, 77, the "Amos" of Amos 'n Andy, who served as Sinatra's best man. Frank ad-libbed a bit during the vows when the judge asked Barbara, "Do you take this man for richer or poorer?" "Richer, richer," the groom urged. It was not only a double-ring ceremony but a double-car ceremony. First Barbara gave Frankie a twelve-cylinder Jaguar. Then Ol' Blue Eyes came rolling through a gap in the hedge with a modest little runabout for her, a peacock blue Rolls-Royce.
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