People

The first issue of TIME included a section that was called Imaginary Interviews, in which celebrities of the day, like Margot Asquith or Princess Yolanda of Italy, were made to provide clever explanations of why they were in the news that week. By 1926, this not entirely successful experiment had acquired the rubric People, but it was only in 1927 that the People section began reporting what real people really said and did. "Names make news, " the section announced, "and last week the following people made the following news. "Herewith a sampler from the 56 years since then:

1927: John Davison Rockefeller Sr. leaned forward from the back seat of his Lincoln limousine, which had been halted in Matawan, N.J., by Policeman Sproul, to answer the policeman's question. Certainly, replied Mr. Rockefeller, the officer might stand on his running board and his chauffeur ("Phillips") might overtake a speeder the officer desired to apprehend. Mr. Rockefeller sank back again into the cushions, peered out at a mile of landscape which slipped by in about one, minute, watched the officer hand their quarry a summons, handed the officer five new dimes.

1928: Sir James Matthew Barrie, author of Peter Pan and other whimsies, was thoroughly vexed at the noise above his apartment in Adelphi Terrace, London. At 3 a.m. he sent a note of protest to the disturbers. At 5 a.m. the noise and the party ceased. The party was given by two newlyweds, David Tennant (son of Viscountess Grey of Fallodon) and Mrs. Tennant (nee Hermione Baddeley, actress). They wore orange sleeping suits of silk; the guests, too, came in blazing pajamas; many brought bottles of hair restorers, ink, gasoline, Thames water. Champagne was not lacking. After the party, Mrs. Tennant said: "Bottle and pajama parties ought to be the vogue in weather like the present . . . I think London will take to the idea."

1929: Leopold Stokowski, proud conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, last week turned upon his applauding audience and said: "This strange beating together of hands has no meaning. To me it is very disturbing. We try to make sounds like music, and then in between comes this strange sound that you make." Delighted, the audience clapped loudly.

1930: Aimee Semple McPherson, soul-saver, returned to the U.S. (via Paris) from a trip to the Holy Land, with Bibles, lamps, some Palestinian garments (to wear in the pulpit of her Angelus Temple Church of the Foursquare Gospel) and bright yellow hair (it was reddish when she left the U.S.). While she whirled away on a 200-mile week-end trip through the Catskills, U.S. Customs agents checked her luggage, levied $138 against her in duties and penalties for undeclared imports. Sister Aimee bemoaned: "I never dreamed . . ." etc. Asked if she would pay, she replied: "Oh yes, if the country needs money I'm always glad to chip in."

1931: Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy) went to bloody Harlan County, Ky., to investigate coal miners' woes. At Pineville rustic detectives said they saw Investigator Dreiser and one Marie Pergain, blonde secretary, go into Dreiser's room. The sleuths propped toothpicks against Investigator Dreiser's door. When they came back next morning, they said, the toothpicks were still in place. Investigator Dreiser, 60, and his friend were indicted for adultery. Mr. Dreiser left Kentucky, protested his innocence, backed it with this public announcement: "I am completely and finally impotent."

1932: Heckled in the House of Commons for referring to "the late Mr. Fisher," Lady Astor retorted: "When people leave this House they are dead to me!" Cried another female M.P.: "What about Lord Astor, your own husband?" Bound to win the argument Lady Astor found herself saying: "Oh, Lord Astor! He's practically dead most of the time!"

1933: Said the Most Rev. William Temple, Archbishop of York: "For some reason which I think perfectly idiotic, there is a special sentiment against hanging women. I do wish the women of England would protest. I think it is a horrible insult to them. They ought to resent it with ferocity."

1934: So pleased was the late John Dillinger with the quick getaway of his Ford car that before his death he wrote two testimonial letters to Henry Ford. Said Ford: "Dillinger told me he was coming to see me sometime. . . . I would like to have seen him."

1935: Mr. & Mrs. George F. Temple took out a $25,000 accident insurance policy on their six-year-old daughter Shirley Temple. A syndicate of British companies underwrote the policy, put in two special clauses: 1) Cinemactress Temple must not take up arms in defense of her country; 2) the policy will be voided if she meets death or accident while intoxicated.

1936: Publisher William Randolph ("Buy American") Hearst sailed for Europe on the Italian liner Rex. With him he took a party of 16, including his son George, his dachshund Helena, Cinemactress Marion Davies. Boomed Publisher Hearst: "Landon will be overwhelmingly elected, and I'll stake my reputation as a prophet on it."

1937: In the Manhattan publishing office of Charles Scribner's Sons was aging Author Max Eastman (Enjoyment of Laughter) conferring with Editor Maxwell Perkins. In walked hefty Author Ernest Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon) and demanded an explanation for Eastman's writing an article in the New Republic called "Bull In The Afternoon" which accused him of "a literary style of wearing false hair on the chest." What next occurred is the subject of variorum accounts. Author Eastman's version: "I knew he could knock me out quickly in a boxing match, so I grappled with him and threw him on his back across Max Perkins' desk and then over the desk and down on his head in a corner." Author Hemingway offered his story as he sailed for Spain. On his forehead were bruises, on his arms, scars. His version: "I got so mad . . . that I wound up by throwing the book in his face. I didn't really sock him. If I had I might have knocked him through the window . . ."

1938: Before a mixed Los Angeles jury of nine middle-aged women and three grey-haired men, Fan & Bubble Dancer Sally Rand stood trial for assault & battery. She testified that candid camera shots taken of her in a Los Angeles theater by Farmer Ray Stanford and his girlfriend, Hazel Drain, had put her in a "ludicrous and lewd position." She denied that she had bitten Miss Drain or that she could have scratched Mr. Stanford (reason: her fingernails were pared to the quick to keep from breaking the bubble). The jury, instructed by the judge, found her guilty. Miss Rand thereupon stood on her head in payment of a bet.

1939: When Cinemactress Katharine Hepburn drove past him near Wilmington, Del., State Trooper Joseph Shannon stopped her "because she looked too young to drive a car." Later he declared: "I soon found out she was not a kid. She was a regular little wildcat. She shrieked . . . and generally acted like a bunch of wildfire."

1940: Playwright Noel Coward, visiting the U.S. for the first time since the war began, divulged his formula for enduring during air raids: "When the warning sounds I gather up some pillows, a pack of cards and a bottle of gin, tuck myself beneath the stairs and do very nicely with the consolations of a drink and solitaire until 'All Clear' sounds."

1941: A furor in Newport over the dilapidation of Mrs. James Jay Coogan's empty mansion on aristocratic Catherine Street turned the spotlight on one of the world's wealthiest recluses: for 25 years Mrs. Coogan, now well into her 80s, has seldom left her Manhattan hotel suite in the daytime, but each night at 9 o'clock she goes down in the freight elevator heavily veiled, drives to her cubbyhole office in a loft building, puts in five hours administering her real-estate fortune (which includes Coogan's Bluff, the Polo Grounds where the Giants play). She never answers letters, for years has hardly glanced at a newspaper. But before her Tammany husband died in 1915 she spent eight years vainly trying to crash Newport society. The book found on her bedroom table in Newport was Burke's Peerage--for 1910.

1942: Dorothy Lamour was refused entrance to the Glenn L. Martin plane plant at Middle River, Md., on the ground that a slow-up for ogling "might cost us half a bomber."

1943: A few days after 18-year-old Oona O'Neill had described her eight-month acquaintance with Charles Chaplin as "entirely on the esoteric side," the comedian packed sleek, sloe-eyed Oona into a car, picked up the certificate and a case of champagne at Santa Barbara, sped to coastal Carpinteria, nervously found the finger for her first and his fourth wedding ring, hid himself and his bride somewhere in Montecito. Only the week before he had agreed to pay his pre-Oona protegee Joan Berry $2,500 down, legal costs, and support until the blood test which may or may not show that he did not father her unborn child. From the white house in the San Francisco hills where Chaplin's new, recently ailing father-in-law Eugene O'Neill works with his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, on a long awaited cycle of plays, no word came. Said Joan Berry: "He can't do this to us."

1944: Frank ("The Voice") Sinatra, patent-leather-lunged idol, opened a three-week engagement at Manhattan's mammoth Paramount Theater, got the usual screaming reception from 30,000 bow-tied, bobby-soxed fans, who caused such a commotion that the Police Department responded with 421 policemen, 20 policewomen, 20 patrol cars, two trucks. The excitement had scarcely died down two days later, when an 18-year-old boy stood up in the theater, threw an egg that smacked Sinatra squarely between the eyes. The egger, Alexander Ivanovich Dorogo-kupetz, was mobbed by Sinatra's fans but rescued by police and ushers. Said Doro-gokupetz: "I vowed to put an end to this monotony of two years of consecutive swooning. . . . I felt good."

1945: Bernarr ("Body Beautiful") Macfadden, still full of beans at 77, hired Manhattan's Carnegie Hall to get a few things off his manly chest. Before a healthy audience of some 2,000, he flailed clerical prudery, and plumped for the healthy life and for good clean sex ("The sexes were never made to be separated"). The white-maned publisher, clad in suit and shoes to match, did push-ups and headstands (calculated to prolong life from ten to 25 years), warned women: "Beauty must be associated with a good digestion."

1946: George Bernard Shaw, the world's greatest living literary figure, turned 90, and had a high old time of it. All day long a procession of literary pilgrims plodded through his Ayot St. Lawrence home near London. Some birthday shafts:

P: "All my life affection has been showered on me, and every forward step I took has been taken in spite of it."

P: "It is sometimes necessary to make people laugh to prevent them from hanging you."

P: "A lady aged 102, when I asked her what life was like at her age, said, 'Nothing but buttoning and unbuttoning.' Not much to look forward to, is it?" 1947: Barbara Hutton, 34, was having some more despite her famed swearing-off statement of last April. ("You can't go on being a fool forever," she said then.) The synthetically svelte heiress married her fourth in a snowy Swiss town, Chur. The groom was a Lithuanian prince--handsome Igor Troubetzkoy.

"What sort of a woman is Barbara, anyway?" demanded the Prince's mother, Princess Katherine, back home in Nice. She was not optimistic: "I've always been afraid of American women."

1948: After 21 months of marriage (her second, his sixth), brunette Novelist Kathleen (Forever Amber) Winsor told the judge about life with her clarinet-tooting husband, Artie Shaw. In 31 pages of searing affidavit, Kathleen swore that Artie had screamed at her, beaten her, come home "drunken, abusive, and belligerent." He had also tried out on her his favorite theory of domestic relations ("The only way to keep a woman in line--be a caveman"). "He boasted of having thrown Lana Turner [Mrs. Shaw No. 3] down a flight of stairs, and said that it improved their marriage considerably. He told me that he had kicked Ava Gardner [Mrs. Shaw No. 5] several times and that she had 'responded nobly.' "

Artie answered right back with 28 pages of tart countersuit. Kathleen, he charged, had refused to bear children ("Children have always enslaved women") and had even suggested an operation which, as the N.Y. Daily News gleefully phrased it, would have made him "forever sterile." And anyway, he added, neither of their Mexican divorces was legal, and so he figures that he is still the lawful wedded husband of Ava.

1949: Sam Goldwyn's troubles with the language were officially immortal. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations had now recorded two of the most celebrated Goldwynisms: "In two words: impossible," and the ever fresh "Include me out."

1950: Cinemactress Joan Crawford, 42, who started out as a Chicago nightclub dancer even before the days of the Charleston, struck a pose for what she figured might be her 8,000th piece of cheesecake art. It had long since become a routine with her, she explained: "I just pull in my tummy, throw out my chest, and let 'er go."

1951: In a Manhattan court, Mrs. Evyleen R. Cronin, 58, onetime secretary-companion and maid to Tallulah Bankhead, was charged with stealing more than $4,000 from her former employer by raising and forging checks. The money was used, cried the defendant's lawyer, to buy things for Miss Bankhead--"Cocaine, marijuana, liquor, booze, whisky, champagne and sex." Retorted outraged lava-voiced Tallulah: "Of course I drink. But nobody has to kite checks to pay for my liquor." As for dope: "Even if I had been getting it--which I certainly wasn't--do you think I'd have been paying for it by check?" But what made Actress Bankhead angriest was the mention of sex. Rumbled she: "God knows I never have had to buy sex."

1952: A New York Times reporter asked Author Truman (The Grass Harp) Capote, 27, to describe himself. Said Capote: "Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy. I think I have rather heated eyes . . . Do you want to know the real reason why I push my hair down on my forehead? Because I have two cowlicks. If I didn't push my hair forward, it would make me look as though I had two feathery horns."

1953: In Manhattan, Actress Diana Barrymore began her evening by pub-crawling with an off-duty policeman ("He has a wife, two children and a Buick and must be nameless"). Returning home after midnight, she found her husband Robert Wilcox arguing with another rival named John McNeill ("I kept saying 'Shut up, boys, shut up, don't be so Hemingway-feudal' "). After two fights ("I said, 'Boys, don't kill anyone in the apartment; it would be awfully messy' "), McNeill was carted off to the hospital for scalp repairs. Diana ordered her husband to pack his things and move out. To the reporters she explained that her own black eye had resulted from a domestic tiff four days earlier ("I don't mind being punched. Noel Coward said that women should be struck regularly like a gong and he's right"). In conclusion, she observed thoughtfully, "Women are no damn good."

1954: Romance came at last to Broadway Critic George Jean Nathan, 72, iconoclastic sniper-in-arms (in the '20s) of H.L. Mencken. Announced Nathan, from Manhattan's Royalton Hotel, where he has lived as a bachelor for 48 years: he would soon marry wraithlike Actress Julie Haydon, 44, with whom he has been keeping company for 17 years. Julie last appeared on Broadway nine years ago as a wispy cripple in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. "The best woman," Nathan once wrote, "is the inferior of the second-best man . . . To enjoy women at all, one must manufacture an illusion and envelop them with it; otherwise they would not be endurable." Last week Prospective Bridegroom Nathan said: "I found the right girl at last."

1955: In Hollywood's main bout of the week, redhaired, spitfire Cinemactress Susan (I'll Cry Tomorrow) Hayward, 34, weighing in at 112 Ibs., fought a one-round free-for-all to a draw with yellow-haired Starlet Jil (A Twinkle in God's Eye) Jarmyn, 23, and a well-turned 110 lbs. Prize: the affections of straight-shooting Horse Operactor Donald ("Red Ryder") Barry, 45, who, true to the best traditions of the Wild West, took no side in the ladies' brawl. Dropping around to Red's house, unannounced, at 11 a.m. for a spot of coffee, Jil was startled to find Susan in bed. Susan came at her with bared talons, a wooden hairbrush and a lighted cigarette, declared Jil, and finally ripped the buttons off her blouse. After swearing out an assault-and-battery complaint against Susan, Jil purred testily: "Why should I sit back and let this woman clobber me?"

1956: The New York Journal-American tapped Italy's billowing Cinemactress Sophia Loren to guest-write a column. In carefully fractured English, Sophia (or a waggish ghost) ground out some profound pap. Sophia's advice to American girls: "Everything I've got I got from eating spaghetti. You try it."

1957: In Monaco's pink-walled palace, Princess Caroline Louise Marguerite, 8 Ibs. 3 oz., uttered her first wail, set off a chain reaction including a radio broadcast by her nervous father, Prince Rainier III, 33, a 21-gun salute from two ancient cannon, harbor whistles, bonfires, street dancing and a torrent of free champagne. No longer would Monacans worry that Rainier would die without an heir, a catastrophe that might have eventually subjected them to France's high taxes and military draft as the prizes of a French annexation.

1958: With the help of hindsight, successful Dictator Francisco Franco probed the failure of unsuccessful Dictator Adolf Hitler: "Hitler was an affected man. He lacked naturalness. Hitler had the soul of a gambler, and furthermore, he totally lacked knowledge of the psychology of peoples. He never understood anything about the soul of the English. He had not prepared, either completely or logically, his war."

1959: During Christmas week, Pope John XXIII left the Vatican to beam his gentle pastoral smile on those who perhaps needed it most--invalid children in a Rome hospital, convicts at the grim Regina Coeli prison, where one inmate asked his help in getting an amnesty from the government. "I don't know what influence I might have in getting the government to grant an amnesty," replied the Pope. "But I have some influence in a much higher place."

1960: The ban on D.H. Lawrence's four-letter specifics of illicit love was removed fortnight ago by a jury of nine men and three women who found Lady Chatterley's Lover not guilty of obscenity. As the titillating tome went on sale for the first time, a Leicester Square book vendor peddled 1,300 copies in an hour after setting out a window placard reading LADY C.--12 SHARP! Among the many objectors to the literary sensation was Major Arthur Neve, secretary of Britain's Gamekeepers Association, who stiffly observed: "The sort of conduct that's mentioned by D.H. Lawrence--it's highly unprofessional, you know. My association couldn't stand for that."

1961: "People are funny about telephones," mused Oilman J. Paul Getty, the world's richest American, now an expatriate at Sutton Place, his million-dollar Tudor mansion outside London. "They'll come as guests and make long-distance calls all over the world. Even a call to London costs one and three ." Pounding a tight fist on the table, he declared that "there should be discipline in money matters, as in all things." Last week the five-time divorced tycoon installed his own form of Sutton Place discipline: a pay phone. "The coin box," chuckled Billionaire Getty, "should take care of things."

1962: As it must to all movie stars, the nude scene came to Marilyn Monroe. It was really in the script of Something's Got to Give, and perfectionist Director George Cukor said no to the flesh-colored "nude suit" Marilyn wanted to wear. Cukor cleared the set of "all males not actually involved in the production," admonished electricians to "turn around," and Marilyn slipped into the pool like Botticelli's Venus, while cameras whirred. As she paddled around, the chief electrician shouted, "Bobby, make your No. 10 a little higher." It was later reported that at this point Marilyn said very distinctly: "I hope Bobby is a girl."

1963: Sick Comedian Lenny Bruce, 37, wasn't laughing. Like he missed the trial. While a Chicago jury was convicting him for an "obscene" nightclub performance, Bruce was being arrested in Los Angeles, charged with possession of narcotics, and released on bail.

1964: At long last, Elizabeth Rosamond Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher took on the Burton. After 24 months as the world's most famous lovers, the seemingly (or unseemlily) inseparable couple made it legal in Montreal at a Unitarian ceremony attended only by eleven of their dearest employees. That night, said Liz, "we sat and talked and giggled and cried until 7 in the morning."

1965: Gstaad is where Charlotte and Anne Ford go to gsport themselves with the young film crowd: George Hamilton, Natalie Wood and David Niven Jr. But since Dad was honeymooning at nearby St. Moritz, the girls dropped over to visit with him and their new stepmother, Christina Ford, 38. "Hi there!" one hearty Midwestern voice boomed at a startled Henry in the lobby of the Palace Hotel. "I'm your dealer in Dayton!"

1966: None of the reviews rankled so much as the one that his "old friend" Edmund ("Bunny") Wilson, 70, wrote for the New York Review of Books last July, picking apart the translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin by Novelist Vladimir Nabokov, 66. At last, in the February Encounter, Lolita's scholarly old man replied to Bunny. "A number of earnest simpletons consider Mr. Wilson to be an authority in my field," Nabokov began, and went on to recall their old association: "I invariably did my best to explain to him his monstrous mistakes of pronunciation, grammar and interpretation" of Russian. And, just to finish the job: "Mr. Wilson's use of English is also singularly imprecise."

1967: Terrible was that combat, Horrible, ugly, vast, gigantic, furious, awesome. Arms is a calling that causes many tears.

That kind of literary style is also enough to make a grown man cry, but in this case, the author can be forgiven. After all, Charles de Gaulle, 76, was only 15 years old. The lad wrote the one-act play, entitled An Unfortunate Encounter, to win a boys' magazine prize for the best playlet in verse. After le petit Charles won the prize, Encounter was printed in 50 copies. Last week a columnist for Le Figaro learned of a rat-chewed copy, unearthed by a book collector, and brought it to the world's attention.

1968: Rain, considered a blessing by the Greeks, had descended like a gray benediction across the island of Skorpids. In the tiny chapel, Jacqueline Kennedy stood quietly--almost in a daze--in her beige chiffon-and-lace dress, Aristotle Onassis in his dark blue business suit. John and Caroline, each carrying a single tall white candle, flanked them. As Archimandrite Polykarpos Athanassion intoned the solemn Greek of the nuptial liturgy, Jackie and Ari exchanged rings and wreaths of lemon blossoms, and drank wine from a single chalice. Then the priest led them round a table three times in the ritual dance of Isaiah. Traditionally in the dance, one of the newlyweds steps on his (or her) partner's foot to signify who will command in the marriage. None of the 25 guests admitted seeing such one-foot-upmanship.

Later came the real show: Ari's wedding gift to Jackie. When she came into the yacht's lounge for the wedding dinner, Jackie was wearing it: on her left hand, a ring with a huge ruby surrounded by large diamonds; on her ears, matching ruby-and-diamond earrings. Caroline broke the stunned silence: "Mummy, Mummy, Mummy! They're so pretty. You're so pretty." Laughing, Jackie removed the ring to let Caroline play with it. The jewels reportedly cost Onassis $1.2 million.

1969: Since 1907, the Oak Room of Manhattan's venerable Plaza Hotel has been an all-male bastion for three hours every weekday at lunchtime. Last week, 15 members of the National Organization for Women, led by that super feminist Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), 47, demanded entrance on the ground that their civil rights were being violated. Five of the ladies actually managed to brush by a Plaza assistant manager and the maitre d' to capture a center table, but the waiters studiously ignored their repeated cries for service, and the ladies were eventually forced to fall back. "This is the only kind of discrimination that's considered moral--or, if you will, a joke," fumed Mrs. Friedan. But she has not given up. She and the NOW girls have begun planning similar raids in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.

1970: After 17 years of New York's Attica State Prison (and a lifetime total of more than 35 years in jail), Willie ("The Actor") Sutton, a tired, sick old man of 68, was ready with some wistful reminiscing. "People don't seem to want to work hard for anything any more," said Willie. "Years ago, cons used to approach me in various prison yards and ask me to lay out a bank job for them. But not lately. These young kids don't believe in hard work." Though Sutton's own hard work may have netted him as much as $2,000,000, all he had when he left Attica was a prison-earnings check for $169.37.

1971: Marriage? Certainly not, said little Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, while Bianca just stood there in her see-through and smiled. Yes, St. Laurent's St. Tropez boutique was making a dress for Bianca, and yes, they were both staying up in the Hotel Byblos there, and yes, "Bianca and I have been together for several weeks. But I have no plans to marry." Still, 21-year-old Bianca Perez Morena de Macias of Nicaragua went on smiling, and Mick added: "I'm not the sort of bloke who would make a big fuss of announcing a date, am I?"

1972: French Actress Catherine Deneuve doesn't talk much about being liberated, but she goes her own way. In 1963 she had a son by Director Roger Vadim and refused to marry him just to satisfy convention. She has been divorced for a couple of years from British Photographer David Bailey, but now friends report she expects another child in May. Catherine has announced no plans to marry the man she has been living with, Italian Actor Marcello Mastroianni.

1973: When the ground began to heave beneath doomed Managua, Nicaragua, Howard Hughes was sound asleep in his hotel which promptly began to swoon. "Cool, so cool," as one aide put it, the phantom of high finance ducked out through falling debris and then spent his 67th birthday camping out in a nearby field. Looking for more comfortable surroundings, he summoned a private jet and flew off to London where he took over a whole floor of a hotel for $2,500 a day. A Hughes aide hinted, however, that the boss might soon emerge from his new hermitage. Said he: "I guess he thinks that life is passing him by a little. He is hoping to live more of a life if people will let him."

1974: The Harvard Lampoon had invited what it called "the biggest fraud in history" to come to Cambridge to accept a Brass Balls Award, created specially for him. Picking up the challenge, John Wayne, 66, rode into town on a 55-ton personnel carrier provided by the Army and accompanied by a bizarre platoon of Jeeps, cavorting cowboys and protesting Indians. At the Harvard Square theater, the Duke was introduced as "a foothill of a man." Then he fielded taunts from the floor. "Is it true your horse filed separation papers?" asked one wag. "H<< was a little upset when we didn't use him in the last picture," explained Wayne. But apparently even he cannot tear down his macho image. In the midst of the debunking, a woman rose and shouted, "I don't care what they say, you're still a man."

1975: She was as lovely as a thoroughbred or a racing shell. "I guess I come off looking like a lightweight," said Model Margaux Hemingway, 19, implausibly, and turned to display a 6-ft. frame. Four months ago, Ernest Hemingway's granddaughter left the family's split-level in Ketchum, Idaho. One night when she was feeling good and funny and true, she revealed that she had been conceived after her parents had put away a bottle of Chateau Margaux, the kind of wine that has rested in cool cellars and must be drunk with reverence. "Tons of things are happening to me now," says Margaux. "I guess it's inevitable that I will get into movies." Perhaps a western, in which "everyone will be women--even the Indians."

1976: When Dr. Benjamin Spock published his Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care back in 1946, Mary Morgan was eight years of age. Three decades later, Mary Morgan Coumille is an organizer of conferences, a divorcee and, as of last week, the second Mrs. Spock. The recently divorced doctor, now 73 and a vice presidential candidate for the microscopic People's Party, met his bride last year while participating in one of her conferences on "the use and abuse of power." That weekend, says Spock, "we fell madly in love."

1977: Actor Lee Marvin's legal troubles began when his ex-roommate filed suit against him. Her claim: the two made an oral agreement to share all property accumulated during the time they lived together (1964-70). Michelle Triola Marvin, as she calls herself, demanded that the actor ante up a solid million--including shares in film rights, a home in Malibu, and an island in the South Pacific. Though Marvin denied that such an agreement was ever made, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of his 36-year-old ex. The landmark decision, handed down last week, states that cohabitation gives both parties the right to share property if they separate. Said Michelle's lawyer, Marvin Mitchelson: "This decision will open up the courthouse door to everyone living together." The door appears to be revolving. According to surveys in California, there are more people in the 21 to 30 age group in the state living together than are married.

1978: Life begins at 54 for Liza Minnelli and Shirley MacLaine and Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Supermodel Cheryl Tiegs. Oh, yes, and for Bianca Jagger and Tennis Star Vitas Gerulaitis and even Bella Abzug. Inside Manhattan's hottest disco, Studio 54, the elite meet to gyrate to the beat, gape and be gaped at. Owner Steve Rubell, who light-show years away was a Wall Street broker, stations himself at the doorway (with a few bouncers) to weed the throngs begging for entrance. "We only want fun people," he explains. "The wilder the clothes, the better the chance you have of getting in. We discourage the Bagel Nosh-polyester group." And a lot of other folks besides. John F. Kennedy Jr., who neglected to drop his name, was turned away. Even Dallas Cowboy Defensive End Harvey Martin, the terror of the Super Bowl, was stopped at the door. Now that's selectivity. Or a death wish.

1979: What finer homage to Pianist Arthur Rubinstein on reaching 92? For 17 hours Radio France broadcast Rubinstein's greatest performances, followed by a live concert at Paris' Theatre des Champs-Elysees programmed by the maestro himself. "Composing a concert is like composing a menu," he announced, explaining his choices of Debussy, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Mozart and Schubert. "I believe in musical digestion. If you start with light pieces and play a 45-minute sonata after the interlude, it's like starting dinner with hors d'oeuvres and dessert and finishing with a Chateaubriand and vegetables." 1980: Life with a Congressman need not be dull, especially if the Congressman is Democrat John Jenrette, who lost his House seat in the November election after being convicted of bribery in the FBI Abscam investigation. Writing in last weekend's Washington Post magazine, Rita Jenrette, 30, confesses: "I knew the honeymoon was over when I rolled over one morning to find John's side of the bed unruffled. I found him drunk, undressed and lying on the floor in the arms of a woman who I knew was old enough to be his mother."

1981: Along with diet books, cat books and advisories on how to make a profit from the coming apocalypse, there is a growing shelf concerned solely with mastering that infuriating, six-sided, six-colored, 27-part boggier with 42.3 quintillion possible combinations known as Rubik's Cube. The latest entry: You Can Do the Cube (Penguin; $1.95) by Patrick Bossert, 13, a London schoolboy who discovered the cube only this spring during a family ski vacation in Switzerland. Within five days he had mastered the monster, and later began selling his schoolmates a four-page, mimeographed tip sheet for 450. An alert editor at Penguin saw a copy and persuaded the prodigy to turn pro. The 112-page result contains three dozen "tricks" for solving the cube (using logic rather than math), as well as a chapter on "Cube Maintenance" (to loosen a stiff cube, "put a blob of Vaseline on the mechanism"). With 250,000 copies of the cubist's book in print, a Penguin executive marvels: "It's the biggest, runaway, immediate success we have had since we published Lady Chatterley's Lover in paperback."

1982: Our story begins in Boston, nearly 60 years ago, with a high school girl. "I took all sorts of jobs to earn money," she remembers. "I was asked to pose for a statue of Spring, for a fountain." The lass obliged, in the buff. "It was lovely, beautiful. I had the perfect figure for it," she says. "I've heard it's still up there in a park some place, though I've never seen it since." The leaves of the calendar tumble to reveal the present. The young lady, now at the other end of life, is Bette Davis, 74, and she is playing Alice Vanderbilt, the imperious matriarch of that gilded clan in Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last, an NBC mini-series for next season. The scene now shifts back to Boston, where Davis' comments spark a two-week, city-wide search for the statue. Finally, Cornelius Vermeule, curator of classical art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, pieces together the available clues and concludes that the lost relic is in a seldom-trod corner in the museum's basement. The subject of the fuss, a 92-in. bronze statue titled Young Diana, is a somewhat androgynous-looking nymph. Vermeule's professional opinion: "There is indeed a strong resemblance--her profile, the contours of her face, and her eyes." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.