The premiere promoters hustled Sex Symbol Brigitte Bardot off to Hollywood for the West Coast opening of Viva Maria! and Sex Symbol Sophia Loren had Manhattan all to herself. Well, not all. Such other delightful images as Julie Christie and Geraldine Chaplin paraded into Broadway's Capitol theater for the premiere of Doctor Zhivago, but the crowd saved the rave for Sophia, who didn't even play in the picture. She just tagged along in white mink cape and Dior gown with Producer Carlo Ponti, her once and future husband. In all the crush, Sophia and Carlo were beaming because of some moral support they'd got from the French government the day before. Carlo, a new-vintage French citizen, obtained a Paris divorce from his first wife, can now marry Sophia legally, even though those bigamy charges against him still haven't got straightened out in Rome.
Two weeks ago the faculty at M.I.T.'s Alfred P. Sloan School of Management held a fine farewell party for Dean Howard Wesley Johnson, 43, who was leaving to become executive vice president of Cincinnati's Federated Department Stores, Inc. Now the professors are kidding Johnson that he really ought to hand back that silver tea service they presented to him as a going-away gift. M.I.T.'s committee on succession turned around and named Johnson, a specialist in industrial relations and executive development, as M.I.T.'s new president, to succeed retiring Physicist Julius Stratton.
In days of old, when peers were bold, and life peeresses weren't invented, Britain's House of Lords decreed that when a member rose to speak he must be "uncovered"—meaning wearing neither hat nor coronet. But Baroness Burton of Coventry, 61, feels positively naked without one of her "super-trilbys" on. And besides, she trilled to the Lords' procedural committee, every time a lady doffs her hat just to do some talking, she wrecks the hairdo. With matters thus brought to a head, the committee waived the 344-year-old rule, allowed that the girls could talk with their hats on. In a black stovepipe creation, Lady Burton immediately spoke out: "The peers have stood up to it very well."
His four grown boys have long since been on their own, so now the Groaner is breaking in a new generation. Harry Lillis Crosby III, 7, came on with the old man for a taped Christmas production of ABC's Hollywood Palace, crooned through a treble version of Oh Come, Little Children that had Papa Bing Crosby, 61, muttering proudly backstage: "Say, that little tiger did all right." While the boys were hamming it up for TV, Mama Kathy Grant Crosby took Mary Frances, 6, up to the Hyatt Music Theater near San Francisco to make her debut as a bit-player in a musical Peter Pan but alas, Kathy got panned as Peter. The San Francisco Examiner's Critic Jeanne Miller took after poor Mary Frances as well, with the slightly weird complaint that she was "stodgy."