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The White House issued a cryptic statement indicating that Lynda Bird Johnson, 22, "has begun her summertime travel plans." Everybody thought that she would head straight for Spain to start off a European jaunt. But no, the itinerary veered off to Los Angeles, where Lynda got together with a furry-looking character named George Hamilton, 26, her beau, now bearded for a movie part. While they fox-trotted at a benefit ball, the U.S. Embassy staff in Madrid was scouting around to find a stand-in for George, to escort the young lady while she's there.
Futurist Marshall McLuhan, who has written books such as Understanding Media to explain that books are extinct, used the medium of his mouth at the International P.E.N. Congress in Manhattan to tell the 600 assembled novelists, poets and playwrights just where they will stand in the future. "We are about to see an age where the environment itself is arranged as a teaching machine," he lectured delphically. "The author is going to be engaged in programming the teaching machine." McLuhan unsettled the writers further with a slogan: "Artists should go to the control tower, not the ivory tower." But they all relaxed when Critic Norman Podhoretz cracked that he was having trouble getting his electronic earphones to work during translations. "Mr. McLuhan couldn't get his to work either," he gibed.
Scarcely three weeks after the show opened at Broadway's Winter Garden, Angela Lansbury, 40, who had spent most of her career typecast as a termagant, came forward in Manhattan's Rainbow Room and accepted the American Theater Wing's Tony Award as the best musical actress of the season. "Up to now, I've always been such a good nominee," the whacky Mame wept happily. Some of the other winners: Richard Kiley, 44, judged the best musical actor for his Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha; Rosemary Harris, 38, best dramatic actress, in The Lion in Winter; Hal Holbrook, 41, best dramatic actor, for Mark Twain Tonight; and sardonic Producer David Merriclc, 54, and German Playwright Peter Weiss, 49, for Marat/Sade.