DIVORCED. Christina Onassis, 29, Greek shipping empress; and Sergei Kauzov, 40, her third husband and sometime Soviet her third husband and sometime Soviet shipping functionary; on the grounds of irreconcilable differences; after 21 months of marriage; in Switzerland. "They did not part in anger," one Swiss lawyer reported; a multimillion-dollar settlement reportedly helped soften the blow for Kauzov.

DIED. John C. Bennett, 56, retired Army major general who played a role in the Watergate scandal as a presidential assistant and official custodian of the infamous White House tapes after their discovery in July 1973; of injuries received in the crash of his plane near Anchorage. It was Bennett who revealed the existence of unexplained gaps in the tapes and later testified extensively about the still mysterious 18 1/2-minute erasure of a conversation between Richard Nixon and Aide H.R. Haldeman about the Democratic Party headquarters break-in in June 1972.

DIED. George Pal, 72, Hollywood producer-director and pioneer of cinema science fiction, whose special effects won his films eight Academy Awards; of an apparent heart attack; in Beverly Hills, Calif. The Hungarian-born Pal, who came to the U.S. in 1939, had already made a name as a cinema cartoonist, but soon turned to full-length features; his first science-fiction film, Destination Moon (1950), anticipated procedures and equipment used in the 1969 lunar landing and brought him an Oscar, followed by others for The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. He was pleased by the sci-fi revival sparked by Star Wars, which, he said, "proved again that a special effect is as big a star as any in the world."

DIED. Arthur Levitt, 79, New York State comptroller from 1955 to 1978, whose nonpartisan dedication, thrift with public funds and relentless criticism of fiscal chicanery endeared him to voters, who returned him to office five times with huge majorities; in New York City. A Brooklyn lawyer and nominal Democrat, Levitt served under four Governors, tightening the state's auditing procedures, including "performance audits" of state agencies, and eventually giving his office prestige and power virtually beyond politics.

DIED. Leonard Woods Labaree, 82, former Farnam Professor of History at Yale University, where he headed the ambitious project of collecting, annotating and publishing all of Benjamin Franklin's surviving papers; in Northford, Conn. From 1954 until his retirement 15 years later, Labaree was in charge of a group of scholars who assembled copies of 27,800 manuscript documents, then transcribed and edited the first 14 volumes (including Franklin's spirited, salty Autobiography) of a collection that may run to 40 volumes when completed.

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