Invitations to the Paris gala benefit prescribed: "Smoking pour les hommes et pour les femmes," which in this case did not mean that everyone should light up a Gauloise. Smoking meant le smoking, French for dinner jacket, and nearly all the girls, falling in with a trend started by Designer Yves St. Laurent last year, showed up looking like either Marlene Dietrich or a headwaiter. Well, almost. Certainly no one would have taken Singer Francoise Hardy, 23, for a captain. Still, the men in the crowd at the Moulin Rouge party seemed more fascinated by the barely clad dancers onstage than they did by le smoking.
During more than 50 years in the business, Society Bandleader Meyer Davis has gone bouncing along, adapting his sidemen to such mysterious rites as the shimmy, the black bottom, the big apple and the lindy. Now Meyer and his boys are constrained to blare out frug and watusi beats to accompany the debutantes. But the end is in sight, he says hopefully. "A lot of younger people are getting tired of that terrible noise," he remarked in Manhattan. "It's the death of conversation. Besides, boys are beginning to realize that it's sort of pleasant to hold a girl in their arms when they dance."
"Shut up, you moron!" roared Gaston Defferre, 56, a Socialist Deputy and mayor of Marseille. Those were fighting words to Gaullist Deputy René Ribière, 45, and after all the political caterwauling had died down in France's National Assembly, he confronted the Socialist to demand satisfaction. Despite friends' pleas to forget the nonsense, Ribière chose swords, they both chose seconds and met next day at noon in suburban Neuilly. "This is not a comedy," growled Defferre. "I am not going to stop until I'm hors de combat." "Oh, really?" gulped Ribière, who had never even held a sword before.
For four minutes the gallants scuffled and grunted, until Defferre nicked Ribière on the wrist and then opened a small cut on his forearm. At that point, the loser allowed as how honor had been satisfied. "He's still a moron," said Defferre. "It's congenital."
Something like 4,000 folks turned out to meet Georgia's Governor Lester Maddox, 51, at an open house at the executive mansion in Atlanta, and everybody was having a real fine howdy when suddenly a Negro lady whispered to Mrs. Maddox: "These four men here are convicts—and one of them is my son." Indeed, the next four guests in the receiving line had just escaped from a prison work camp in Wilkinson County, and they had a lot more to say than just hello. After he'd uncricked his neck from the double take, Maddox led them to an office to hear about the camp where, they said, guards amused themselves by threatening to shoot the prisoners' legs off, the barracks were overcrowded, and the toilets never flushed properly. Maddox ordered an immediate investigation.