CBS was worried. Christina Crawford, one of the stars of the soap opera The Secret Storm, had been rushed off to the hospital for emergency surgery. Who would fill in for her? Mother, of course, for Mother is Dowager Screen Queen Joan Crawford. Price was no problem; Joan was happy with union minimum. But how could a 60-year-old woman pass for the 27-year-old she was to play? No problem either. A session with the makeup man and a youthful hairdo, plus her own well-preserved looks, turned the trick for the four segments Joan will appear in. After that, the character will be written out of the show until Christina gets back to the set. Said Christina, eldest of Joan's four adopted children: "I couldn't exactly jump up and down in bed about it, but it was fantastic she would care that much."
There was standing room only in the National Film Theater when London's cinema fans turned out en masse to hear nouvelle vague Director Jean-Luc Godard deliver a lecture on movie making. But the appointed hour came and went with no sign of the speaker. Finally, the disappointed audience was read a telegram from the elusive Godard: "If I am not there, take anyone in the street, the poorest if possible, give him my £ 100 lecture fee, and talk with him of images and sound, and you will learn from him much more than from me because it is the poor people who are really inventing the language. Yours anonymously, Godard."
Who but a lawyer would ever try to make a case for the Mafia? Luigi Barzini, for one. The Mafia "gives the Sicilians some sort of order in a country governed by foreign oppressors," said the Italian author-journalist in a discussion with students at Los Angeles' Occidental College. "The Mafia man uses the family and will not do degenerate things—he'll have nothing to do with heroin or prostitution." All of which leads Barzini to believe that Lucky Luciano, deported from the U.S. in 1946 as an undesirable alien who dabbled in dames, was never really a Mafia man. "When I read in American papers that Luciano masterminded a drug ring and brothels, I know he is not Mafia." In fact, noted Barzini with some pride, "the Mafia swindled him out of mil lions of lire."
"Jackie Onassis. Jackie Onassis," mused Columnist Herb Caen in the San Francisco Chronicle. "It sounds funny, but we got used to Senator George Murphy and Governor Ronald Reagan." For a week now, the former Jacqueline Kennedy had been Mrs. Aristotle Onassis, and the world and Herb Caen were beginning to get used to it. Still, though the initial stir of excitement had receded, there was no shortage of comment, much of it venomous.