"The setup is this: we're selling 600 memberships at $25,000 apiece. That's 15 million bucks, which is what it will take to build the golf course. Anybody can join—white, Negro, Catholic, Jew, Italian. What we're looking for is young people on the go, not just actors but doctors, lawyers, people from every walk of life. I got nothing against old people, but they just don't make for a lively atmosphere at a golf club." He isn't kidding. The mountains above Beverly Hills are being graded, and when the 18-hole Beverly Hills Country Club course is finished in 1969, he fully expects that 600 young Negroes, Jews and Italians from all walks of life will have coughed up their $25,000 apiece to play golf. After all, with Dean Martin, 49, set to be their president, who could afford to say no?
Majestic as a ship of the line, Dramatic Soprano Eileen Parrel I, 47, cruised through an aria from La Gioconda as she neared the end of a concert at Atlanta's Municipal Auditorium. Suddenly the mighty voice quit cold. "You wouldn't believe it, but I've forgotten it," blurted Eileen to the audience. By the time the laughter died, her memory had recharged itself, and she finished the aria to a cataract of applause. Later, she bemusedly recalled the contretemps that had built up to her monumental blank. "The programs were printed incorrectly. The weather was 90° and I could have died. They'd just painted my dressing room and my eyes were watering. And all of a sudden—clank!—I couldn't remember the song."
Ordinarily, General Motors Chairman Fred Donner keeps his wit to himself. Last week, after Donner and G.M. President James M. Roche delivered their annual state-of-the-company report to stockholders, the chairman was needled by critics about the size of his salary and bonus (a total $790,000 last year).
Donner coolly noted that the bonus fluctuates with his company's fortunes but that the salary, alas, hasn't changed from its $200,000 annually in almost nine years. "So I have the distinction of being the only employee without a pay raise since 1958." While the stockholders laughed, Donner added: "But I'm not complaining."
There must be 500 miniskirts swirling around when this longhair composer David Amram sits in with the band to blow I'm Coming, Virginia on the French horn. And there's Allen Ginsberg gassing pretty good with Arthur Miller at a table in the corner, and Norman Mailer won't shut up about his friend Jose Torres, the light-heavyweight fighter who keeps losing. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wants to shut up about Viet Nam but they bug him with it. And there's Charles Addams and David Merrick and maybe a thousand other names all jammed in this Manhattan cellar raising money for the Paris Review, which practically none of them reads but which George Plimpton, 46, edits when he is not sparring with Archie Moore or playing football and writing books like Paper Lion. "Everything George touches turns to gold," says one writer, looking around. "That's why I hate him."