Outside of the royal family, the only person in the British Commonwealth who rates being addressed as Her Majesty is Salote, the 6-ft. 3-in., 280-lb. Queen of the Tonga. Last week Her Majesty, 60, winged in from her Polynesian archipelago to Sydney, Australia, to have a historical ball in that city's famed Cape Mitchell Library. Her scholarly project was to fill in the gaps in Tonga's archives. She pored over papers dating back to 1797, examined the journals of Circumnavigator James Cook, who first saw Tonga in 1773, duly noted that Explorer Abel Tasman, discoverer of Tasmania, had paid a visit to Tonga way back in 1643. Fascinated, the Queen is now undecided as to whether the royal treasury would be strained more by the cost of microfilming the records in Australia or by dispatching a scholar to Sydney for a year's work.
When Cuba's ousted Dictator Fulgencio Batista, supposedly foresightedly, put up $82,500 in 1957 for a large pink stucco hacienda in Daytona Beach, Fla., many of the locals began speculating about what sort of effect he might have, as a neighbor, upon real estate values. After Batista fled Cuba on New Year's Day, 1959, he wound up in the Madeira Islands, where most of his household has since joined him. Batista has apparently given up hopes of taking up exile in the U.S. soon. Said his secretary: "You can be sure he's trying to sell the house. He told me so."
Seventy-three years have passed since a young teacher in Alabama held her little pupil's hand under a flowing pump spout and manually spelled out the word "water" upon the palm of blind, deaf Helen Keller. Last week Miss Keller, almost 80, went to Radcliffe College for the in formal dedication of the Anne Sullivan Memorial Fountain, which flows in the Helen Keller Garden that was presented to her at the 50th reunion of her class ('04). Before feeling the water, Miss Kel ler smiled mistily, read a Braille inscrip tion at the back of the fountain: "In memory of Anne Sullivan, teacher extraordinary, who beginning with the word, water, opened to the girl Helen Keller the world of sight and sound through touch."
After a month of occasional running in the U.S., Australia's shaggy-maned Herb Elliott, 22, world's fastest miler (3:54.5), flew back Down Under and got his first haircut since he had left. It cost him 56¢ for a "back and sides" job in a Syd ney barbershop. Explained economy-minded Elliott: "Why pay $2 in the States for a five-bob haircut?"
Announcing their comebacks after long retirements : two fiftyish former cinema stalwarts — Anna May Wong, 53, who quit the screen 17 years ago after count less mystery women roles in Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan easterns; and Leni Riefenstahl, 53, German film star of the 1930s, called by Hitler "the perfect ex ample of German womanhood," who will redirect a remake of a movie in which she once starred, The Blue Light.