MARRIED. William Welsh Graham, 31, adjunct professor of law at U.C.L.A. and son of Washington Post Co. Chairman Katharine Graham; and Caroline Gushing, fortyish gossip columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and onetime companion of David Frost; in Beverly Hills, Calif.; he for the first time, she for the third.

DIED. Richard Rovere, 64, astute political reporter and author who for 30 years wrote the Washington Letter for The New Yorker; of emphysema; in Poughkeepsie, N. Y. The New Jersey-born son of an electrical engineer, Rovere graduated from Columbia and worked as an editor at the Nation before joining The New Yorker in 1944. A liberal who had once flirted with Communism, Rovere was noted for his fairness, his objectivity and his ability to place politics in perspective.

DIED. Merle Oberon, 68, arrestingly beautiful cinemactress who rose to fame in the '30s and '40s in such classics as Wuthering Heights and The Scarlet Pimpernel; after a stroke; in Los Angeles. Oberon was born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson on the island of Tasmania. Educated in India, she left for England in 1928, worked as an extra and dance hostess until she met and married Film Producer Alexander Korda. Her 1933 portrayal of Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII made her a star. Divorcing Korda in 1945, she went on to play such Hollywood roles as George Sand in A Song to Remember and Josephine opposite Marlon Brando's Napoleon in Desiree.

DIED. Dewey Short, 81, oft elected (twelve terms), former Republican Congressman from Missouri who became Assistant Secretary of the Army under Eisenhower; of a heart attack; in Washington.

DIED. Immanuel Velikovsky, 84, Russian-born psychoanalyst and iconoclastic author, whose unorthodox theories of cosmic evolution, published in 1950 as Worlds in Collision, outraged scientists; in Princeton, N.J. Combining a vast knowledge of biblical and mythological lore with his study of Freud's analysis of the subconscious mind of Moses, Velikovsky developed a controversial theory of colliding planets. He contended--in total violation of the laws of celestial mechanics--that a fragment from the planet Jupiter brushed by earth in 1500 B.C. before settling into orbit as the planet Venus. The cataclysmic encounter, he claimed, caused hurricanes and floods and an interruption in the earth's rotation, thus explaining such seemingly miraculous events described in the Old Testament as the parting of the Red Sea. Though his ideas earned him visionary status among a youthful following, he sought but never obtained recognition from scholars, many of whom referred to him as the "Grand Old Man of the Fringe."

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