People: Aug. 20, 1965

The "Scilly Season" had arrived, and there was Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson, 49, tramping around in rumpled shorts and sandals on vacation with his family in the Scilly Isles just off the tip of Cornwall. The Wilsons have always found the Scillies a grand spot for a quiet holiday, but this year, now that he is P.M., Wilson's outing in the sparsely populated isles has looked like a political junket, with all those sweating newspapermen tailing him around, and Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart dropping over from the mainland to talk statecraft. It's even getting so that members of the local Scillonian Club are feeling nervous about calling him "Harold" anymore. Returning from a twelve-day honeymoon on Marco Island, off Florida's west coast, and Nassau, New York City's Mayor Robert Wagner, 55, made a politic assessment of the stewardship of his bride, Barbara Cavanagh Wagner, in the kitchen cabinet. "The fish wasn't bad," said the mayor, "but the roast needed a little more practice. And a little more flavor. I think she needs fur ther instruction." "Noel Coward once said that some women should be struck regularly, like a gong," wrote Novelist John O'Hara, 60, in his weekly column for Long Island's Newsday. Accepting the advice, O'Hara proceeded to administer a few verbal thunks to Elizabeth Taylor, 33, who had gotten sore in 1959 about having to star in a movie version of his novel Butterfield 8. The objection wasn't literary, said O'Hara, it was just that M-G-M insisted on her doing Butterfield for $150,000 when she wanted to get started on Cleopatra for $2,000,-000. Her basic mistake, the column went on, was giving "the remarkable opinion that the heroine of my novel was 'practically a prostitute.' Bear in mind that the part she was eager to play was Cleopatra, not Joan of Arc. Bear in mind, too, the fact that the then Mrs. Eddie Fisher had already been Mrs. Todd, Mrs. Hilton and Mrs. Wilding, though not yet 30 years old, and had long since changed her public image from that of the little girl who loved a horse in National Velvet." "Ingrid's really like a pixie," said one of her friends. Ingrid ("Fiffi") Finger, 19, is no such thing! Pixies do not come 5 ft. 7 in., 36-23-36—although the figures were spritely enough to convince the judges that Ingrid, a Miss Germany from Niirnberg, should be crowned Miss International Beauty at Long Beach, Calif. As usual, all the other girls in the contest beamed pluckily through their disappointment, but back in Manhattan there was one who didn't: Regina Ruta, the Lithuanian-born blonde who was chosen Miss New York City last month and then disqualified because her U.S. citizenship had not yet come through. She announced that she is giving up beauty contests forever to become a veterinarian.