What was George Hamilton doing holding hands with that long, leggy Texas model, Alana Collins, and making all those fun Italian scenes from Rome to Capri? "Alana and I are just very good friends," George explained. As a matter of fact, he added, she was helping him scout the latest fashions for the string of boutiques he is being forced to open in New York, California and Europe. Forced? Well, it's either that or let Uncle Sam dip heavily into all that money that he's being paid for The Survivors, his new ABC-TV series that starts this fall.
Last April, the rites of spring at Manhattan's Barnard College centered around Linda LeClair, 20, and her loud fight for every girl's right to live off campus with the roommate of her choice. Linda won that argument, but now it seems that she has given up on stuffy old Barnard altogether, choosing to drop out this fall in favor of communal housekeeping on Manhattan's West Side. Barnard President Martha Peterson, says Linda, has her sympathy. "She is aware that recognizing sexual intercourse would cause embarrassment to the ladies that give money to the college."
Imperial Russian counts have never carried much clout in the Soviet Union. But Count Leo Tolstoy is somebody special. Last week marked the 140th birth day of the great author, whose deep sympathy for the restive peasants of his day has earned him the approval of the Kremlin. To honor the occasion there was a large party at Moscow's State Museum and a mass pilgrimage to his grave. For a change, party functionaries and intellectuals found something they could celebrate together.
When doomsayers are bemoaning the human condition, a refreshing breeze blew out of Missouri from famed Psychiatrist Karl Menninger, 75. "A hundred years ago, violence was much worse than it is today," the chairman of the board of trustees of the Menninger Foundation told a group of Park College students. "You say it isn't safe to walk down the streets today. It never was safe to walk down some streets." The world, insisted Menninger, "is getting better. We're getting better control of violence and of our own behavior than we've ever had before." Then he added: "But let's get the world just a little more civilized still."
"This is a letter of hate," Playwright John Osborne cried out in 1961 in an open letter to England written from France. "Damn you, England. You're rotting now and quite soon you'll disappear." Neither England, nor Osborne for that matter, disappeared, and today the Angry Young Man has taken to attacking new targets. In another open letter he complains, "I am exploited ruthlessly by the Iron Curtain countries, who steal my work" in comparison with the United States, where "the capitalist system has degenerated into a new era of squalor, ugliness, brutality and oppression." All these things considered, then, he admits that there "is some relief to be a worker, alive and well and living in London."