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Four years after the 1958 coup that ended royal rule in oil-rich Iraq, a pretty blonde girl, Genevieve Arnault, 23, told a strange story to a Manhattan court. She was, she said, the widow of assassinated King Feisal II, 23 at the time of his death. They had fallen in love at a garden party in Greenwich, Conn, given by her mother, a lady engineer and construction company executive. In 1957 Genevieve went to Baghdad, where she and Feisal were secretly married. Who believed it? A Manhattan surrogate court judge, that's who. The judge ruled that she is Feisal's lawful widow, making her eligible for $124,000 in the late King's Manhattan bank account, untold amounts more abroad if foreign courts agree.
"Love is not a stimulating emotion," proclaimed Dr. Morris Fishbein, 73, retired editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "It's a weakening one. The victim sweats, his blood vessels dilate, he takes on a pale and sickly look." For every Leander ready to swim the Hellespont, "the record is filled with stories of coronaries and strokes brought on by exertion caused by too much emotion."
A resolution to grant the first honorary U.S. citizenship* to Sir Winston Churchill, 88, bogged down in Congress recently, when worrywarts feared that the honor might later be passed out like green stamps. But the states may do the job piecemeal. Nebraska's legislature made Sir Winston a state citizen last week; Tennessee is about to do so this week. The man who once described himself as a living Anglo-American alliance already has scads of transatlantic ties, from honorary citizenship in the city of Jacksonville, Fla., to life membership in the Friendship Veterans Fire Engine Co. of Alexandria, Va. Yet Sir Winston is an honorary citizen (since 1941) of only one country—to wit, Cuba.
Ill lay: Herbert Lehman, 84, former New York Democratic Governor and Senator, with a fractured left hip, after a fall in his bedroom, in Palm Springs, Calif.; Van Cliburn, 28, rag-mopped pianist, recovering from tonsillitis, holding up a Western concert tour, in Tucson, Ariz.; Sir Anthony Eden, 65, former British Prime Minister, of a mild anginal attack, on Barbados; Marshall Bridges, 31, star (8-4) relief pitcher for the New York Yankees last year, laid up with a .25-cal. slug from a lady's pistol in his left calf, following a barroom wild pitch, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
*Not even the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who fought beside George Washington, got U.S. citizenship directly. Granted citizenship in the ex-colonies of Maryland and Virginia, the Marquis (and all his male descendants) automatically thereby became a citizen of the Republic in 1788 when the Constitution was ratified.