As he deplaned at New York's Idlewild Airport for a U.S. visit, Aleksei Adzhubei, 37, a pudgy, fair-haired carbon of Father-in-Law Nikita Khrushchev, was pointedly asked by a U.S. newsman: "As editor of Izvestia, are you responsible for the policies of the paper and its editorial content?" The Red editor's first reaction was a reflex affirmative. His second, delivered in the only English he used during the interview: "Maybe."
Widely known for his interpretations of other writers—his works include a graceful translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a critique of Amy Lowell and her times, and A History of American Poetry—Litterateur Horace Gregory, 63, last week was honored for his own urbane verse with the 1961 fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. A fulltime writer since a 1960 illness ended his 26-year teaching career at New York's Sarah Lawrence College, the Milwaukee-born poet reported "surprise" at his selection by a panel of other poets, including W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore. On the $5,000 that goes with the award, Gregory offered no direct comment, but in Medusa in Cramercy Park and Other Poems, his sixth verse collection, which was published last week, he wrote:
It is not money, but power that lives in money
That heats the blood and turns the soul to ashes,
Freezes the heart, and changes life to clay,
Invisible spirit against the human spirit.
To celebrate his first birthday (Nov. 25), the White House lifted the swaddling curtain for the first fullface portrait of John F. Kennedy Jr. since his christening, revealed that, although the picture shows him chomping on a toy rooster, a hand-me-down steam engine from Sister Caroline is actually his favorite possession. Other vital statistics cleared for release: weight—23 lbs.; height—30 in.; vocabulary—"Da-da, Mama and other noises."
After a publicity-winning preview sale to her perennial Palm Beach hostess, Rose Kennedy, chic Helene Arpels, fiftyish, a regular titlist in the world's ten-best-dressed-women stakes, opened to the public a gemlike boutique in Manhattan's St. Regis Hotel. Located just two blocks from where her estranged husband, Louis Arpels of Van Cleef & Arpels, traffics in tiaras, the new establishment stocks such exotica as 17th century quill pens with ballpoint nibs ($13.45) and square-toed velvet bedroom slippers for men ($24). Cooed Mme. Arpels, gesturing at the merchandise with a ring-finger diamond that would choke a Gabor: "I'm so amused with my new toy."
Unmoved by the defendant's recollection that "I drove various types of vehicles from Alamein to Berlin with no trouble to anyone except the Germans," a London court hit Field Marshal Lord Montgomery, 74, with a $28 fine for steering his Daimler the wrong way on a one-way street—and into another car.