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Seemingly headed for an off-screen Oscar for her supporting role in a deep-water drama was Jayne Mansfield, 28. Water-skiing from a chartered outboard off Nassau, the busty cinemorsel, her muscleman husband Mickey ("Mr. Universe of 1956") Hargitay and a friendly publicist suddenly turned up missing—a calamity that evoked outsize headlines all across the U.S. plus a massive. Coast Guard-led search. Rescued after a night on a lonely islet, the castaways explained that Jayne had frenziedly overturned their boat after the party spotted sharks (in waters in which the Nassau Yacht Club hadn't seen any in years). When local officials had the temerity to question their story, the teary-eyed former Mr. Universe fumed: "I am very hurt. Jaynie doesn't need publicity. It's a miracle this girl is living today." The war of innuendo between West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his perennial heir apparent. Vice Chancellor and Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard, raged on. Five weeks after Erhard marked Adenauer's 86th birthday with the gift of a stone bench (which he carefully specified was not intended for use in retirement), Adenauer paid his second visit to the Economics Ministry in twelve years to give Erhard a pair of thoughtfully chosen 65th birthday gifts: a recorded selection of Adenauer speeches and a baroque desk clock, which promptly rang the hour, leading Cabinet jesters to wonder for whom it tolled. But final blood went to Erhard supporters in the interministerial glee club which serenaded Adenauer's departure with a chorus from The Flying Dutchman: "Steersman, leave the watch!" His hackles raised by a critic's description of him as "the thinking man's Mickey Spillane," British Mystery Writer Ian Fleming, 53, sniffed to a New York Herald Tribune reporter: "I can't remember any piece of knowledge that Spillane has given me; you've got to be well educated to write good thrillers. I was expensively educated* and I'm proud of my factual knowledge." It was true, conceded Fleming, that his good friend Allen Dulles had "tried out two or three of the technical gimmicks in my books in the laboratories of the CIA, and they didn't work." But this, insisted the man who is reputed to be John F. Kennedy's favorite mystery author, was merely "a strong indictment of the CIA." Reverting to her pre-Pulitzer past, when she came within a semester of a law degree. Novelist Harper (To Kill a Mockingbird) Lee, 35, cast herself in the unlikely role of occasional legal adviser and researcher for Truman Capote, a longtime friend from Scouting days in Monroeville, Ala. After accompanying the aging (37) boy author on a fact-finding and mood-gathering trip to Garden City, Kans.—the scene of the Clutter murder case (TIME, Nov. 30, 1959), on which Capote's next book will be based—Miss Lee packed her childhood pal back off to his Swiss writing retreat, having certified his first 200 longhand pages as "magnificent."
* At Eton, Sandhurst, and the Universities of Munich and Geneva. Spillane's alma mater: Fort Hays Kansas State College.