The 82nd anniversary of Stalin's birth cut no ice in Moscow, where Pravda—which in the late dictator's prime regularly praised his name as many as 300 times per issue—wrote him off with a single mention: a reference to "the serious obstacles that the Stalin cult of personality placed in the path of the development of Marxist-Leninist theory.''
In Washington's party-of-the-week. Diane ("Dede") Buchanan, 18, daughter of former State Department Protocol Chief Wiley Buchanan, made her debut in the stately gold-and-white Washington headquarters of the Organization of American States. Upstairs, the elegant elders made their way through a champagne supper to the soothing accompaniment of society's tried-and-true Music Maker Meyer Davis—who wrote for the occasion a number that began "Dede loves to travel and dance all night . . ." Downstairs, under a sign reading DEDE'S PEPPERMINT LOUNGE, the belle of the ball and her peer group rattled the chandeliers keeping time to the Bo Diddley twist combo—and took their refreshments from a mobile hot-dog cart. Some Latino envoys—notably the uninvited—muttered sourly that the'affair was a "profanation" of the OAS building, but Nicaraguan Ambassador Guillermo Sevilla-Sacasa. dean of the capital's diplomatic corps, pronounced it "a perfectly beautiful party."
Baffled by the anxiety of a U.S. newsman to learn her vibrant statistics. Cinemactress Melina (Never on Sunday) Mercouri marveled: "In Greece we don't care if a woman is small or tall or how she is built. We judge her on her charm, tone of voice, and her capacity to listen to a man well. I never give anyone my measurements. I don't know them, so how could I? I could find out what they are. but I really don't see what the argument is about."
Looking like a couple of Abercrombie & Fitch Minutemen, California's Democratic Governor Pat Brown and a Republican predecessor. U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren, indulged in a little apolitical potshooting in the duck-rich Sacramento Valley. "Both of them." assured Comrade at Arms (and Sacramento City Manager) Bartley Cavanaugh. "are careful hunters, and there is no shooting over the limit." Diplomatically unreported by Cavanaugh was the fact that while the Chief Justice did. in fact, knock down his limit of five mallards and sprigs, the city-bred Governor managed to bag only four.
Pushing ahead with his campaign to humanize Britain's dismal prisons, Home Secretary Richard Austen Butler announced his newest device for rehabilitating gaolbirds: a $280 prize for the best original literary, artistic or musical composition produced behind bars. Unmentioned, at his own request, was the instigator and donor of the award: Author Arthur (Darkness at Noon) Koestler, 56. whose Dialogue with Death and Scum of the Earth grew out of his own imprisonment by the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War and by Vichy France during World War II.