When the story came out last spring (TIME, June 11), Actor Peter Lawford, 42, steamed that it was news to him. It just wasn't true, explained Peter, that he and Patricia Kennedy Lawford, 41, had decided on a legal separation after eleven years of marriage. The only split was "geographical," he said, "since my work in movies is in Hollywood" and Pat remained in Manhattan to look after their four children. Now the geography has changed. In Manhattan, Peter's lawyer announced an "amicable separation," and since Pat was in Sun Valley, Idaho, for the skiing, friends thought she might just stay there for six weeks and get the divorce.
Chef René Verdon quit the White House kitchen rumbling that California wines are très ordinaires and Lyndon's favorite dishes are fit only for Him. That was too much for California-born Restaurateur Victor Bergeron, 63, better known as Trader Vic for his string of 13 Polynesian eateries around the U.S. He forked over $3,612 to buy a full page in San Francisco's Examiner & Chronicle to baste René in an open letter. A sampling: "By what stretch of the imagination do you think that French cooking is the only cuisine in the world? It happens that a great many people throughout the country enjoy beets with vinegar sauce. It's about time you Frenchmen start to look around."
Sometimes he certainly acted crazy. Like the day he stood talking earnestly to an oak tree, which he mistook for the King of Prussia. Or during the last years before his death in 1820, when he was shut up in Windsor Castle telling stories, laughing and crying, with a kingdom full of imaginary friends. Besides, he had acted pretty irrationally toward his American colonies. So, on evidence, historians have always believed that Britain's King George III was insane. Now two London psychiatrists have gone back over the medical records, including some still unpublished, and concluded that the historians are nuts. Dr. Richard Hunter and his mother, Dr. Ida Macalpine, wrote in the British Medical Journal that George was obviously suffering from "acute, intermittent porphyria," a rare liver disease that upset the royal nervous system and made the king delirious.
By the end of the twelve-day Viet Nam tour, Actress Carroll Baker, 34, was feeling positively unfrocked. First she lost three suitcases with $7,000 worth of Lanvin gowns inside. After the show with Bob Hope at Chu Lai, the troops admired her $8,000 feathered and beaded Balmain so much that finally one G.I. came up, said Carroll, and murmured, " 'Gee, how about just one of those feathers?' I said O.K., and that started it." The boys "deplumed" her. Since the $7,000 Edith Head number "just disintegrated in the heat, mud and rain," the poor child didn't have a thing to wear coming home to Hollywood. Except, of course, some fatigues that marines donated, along with battle patches, flyers' wings, and four bright stars from General William Westmoreland, the Man of the Year.