People: Sep. 21, 1962

Casting about for a regal type for a walk-on part in the film version of the famed Swedish fairy tale The Wonderful Adventures oj Nils, the producers gave the royal palace a "call. The scene required a noble-looking gentleman to walk through his chamber onto a balcony and peer at a flock of wild geese flying overhead, astride one of which is a ten-year-old boy, Nils. Most of the scene was shot from a hovering helicopter and two time-consuming retakes were needed. Patiently doing his bit: good old (79) King Gustav VI Adolph of Sweden. ∙ ∙ ∙ The cornerstone for the new Wigan Girls High School was all inscribed: "Laid by the Rt. Hon. Hugh Gaitskell, A.D. 1962." But just a few hours before the Opposition Labor Party leader was to come up from London to do the honors, he learned that the school had become involved in a labor argument and that five workers had been fired. Gaitskell refused to show up at the ceremony. "I think," he huffed, "that it would have been most unwise for me to have been involved in this kind of dispute." Responded a disgruntled school official, after the ceremony was called off and the stone put in storage: "It's not much good to us now. We might lay it face downward and use it as part of the floor." ∙ ∙ ∙ Raptly gazing at herself on screen, Brigitte Bardot, 27, liked what she saw almost as much as the Paris critics. Her latest flick, Le Repos du Guerrier (The Warrior's Rest), directed by ex-Husband Roger Vadim, was lavishly lauded as her best bedtime story to date. To celebrate, she and her constant consort, Actor Sami Frey, 27, buzzed off to a Right Bank bistro to nuzzle the night away, touching off a spate of speculation in the Parisian press that Brigitte might, for Sami, convert to Judaism. ∙ ∙ ∙ As Russian Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, 52, told it to a select little clique gathered to watch the Bolshoi Ballet troupe at the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan, his wife, Irina, is an in curable shutterbug, with a passion for sunsets. When she goes back to Russia she will have snapped sunsets in New York, sunsets in Chicago, sunsets in Los Angeles, sunsets in every U.S. city she has visited. Cracked one of the guests in the diamond horseshoe circle, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Adlai Stevenson: "The pictures of dying America, I suppose." ∙ ∙ ∙ "There is beauty even in explosions," intoned flamboyant Jewelry Designer Roger King, 26, whose flashy $3,400 brooch suggesting an A-bomb blast (mushrooms of diamonds rising from a ruby earth) won Britain's "Jewel of the Year" award. Then glaring out at of the the audience in a posh London showroom where his nuclear nugget was on display, King dropped another wee bomb by deploring "the tendency of upper-class women to wear dreary strands of pearls all the time." Totally unruffled was the conservatively dressed, pearl-wearing woman at whom his remarks were aimed: Lady Dorothy Macmillan, wife of the Prime Minister, who once told a reporter, "I regard clothes as my husband regards food — necessary but not to be discussed." Said Lady Dorothy of King: "Pearls go with a lot of things, and I haven't got all that much jewelry anyway."