In the most improbable of auto accidents, a two-tire wheel assembly detached itself from a trailer truck on the Long Island Expressway and smashed into a limousine carrying Gary Grant, 64. The accident mashed the priceless Grant nose, bruised his expensive ribs, and dispatched the actor for nearly a week's stay at St. John's Hospital, where he shared a semiprivate room with the limousine's driver. Also hospitalized: Gratia von Furstenberg, 23, a cousin of Actress Betsy von Furstenberg, who was accompanying Grant to the airport to see him off, and wound up at St. John's instead with a fractured leg and collarbone. Said Cary: "I feel like a Grade B movie."
Life at Cambridge is an eye-opening experience, wrote Britain's Prince Charles, 19, in a maiden essay for the undergraduate newspaper Varsity—particularly at 7 a.m., when the "head-splitting clang" of garbage cans is "accompanied by the jovial dustman's monotonous refrain O Come, All Ye Faithful." After reading that, the Cambridge Urban District Council promptly rerouted Dustman Frank Clarke so that he appeared under the prince's windows at 9 a.m. rather than 7. "I am a bloke who likes to sing at his work," admitted Clarke. "But I think 7 o'clock is time enough for anyone to be up and on parade."
Touring French Singer Francoise Hardy signed autographs for the crowd in Johannesburg, but she was only a spectator herself, waiting outside Groote Schuur Hospital for Philip Blaiberg, 58, world's only living heart-transplant patient. With Surgeon Christiaan Barnard looking on from the doorway, and Wife Elaine at his elbow, Blaiberg took his first breath of fresh air after 74 days in germ-free isolation, then walked to a limousine that carried him home. Ahead lay a careful, publicity-free regimen at his apartment in the suburb of Wynberg, with no visitors for a month, no telephone calls and thrice-weekly examinations by Barnard and his team. He will pass the time, said Blaiberg, beginning a book on his medical adventure.
Playwright William Gibson, 53, best known for The Miracle Worker, is a demon letter writer as well. He heard the talk about 206,000 more troops for Viet Nam and fired off a guided missive to the Berkshire Eagle from his home town of Stockbridge, Mass. "I am offering in all sobriety a reward of $25,000," he wrote, "to anyone who devises and successfully executes a plan to draft Lyndon B. Johnson, put him in uniform complete with butterfly net, and ship him off to the rice paddies." Potential applicants for the prize may be put off by Gibson's payoff record: he volunteered to play honky-tonk piano at a local fund-raising benefit for Senator Eugene McCarthy—and reneged the moment the McCarthyites tried to take him up on the offer.