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Two Manhattan producers announced that they will soon try the onerous feat of bringing a lusty chunk of the stream of consciousness of Author James Joyce to Broadway. Their dramatic selection: the "Nighttown" portion of Joyce's phantasmagoric Ulysses, covering three hours in a Dublin bordello, most of it originally set down by Joyce in playscript form. Hard to read, harder to act, impossible to stage with its own wild flavor intact because of obvious censorship obstacles, "Nighttown" is bound to keep playgoers consulting not only programs but probably interpretive texts carried into the theater by the bushel and read by match-light. Sample of the brothel-born maunderings of Ulysses' protagonist Leopold Bloom: "I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is will then tomorrow as now was be past yester ... I stand, so to speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general postoffice of human life [feeling] a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle ..." The producers may also have trouble with some of the animal actors (including an egg-laying rooster) called for in Joyce's script. Sample stage direction: The bulldog growls, his scruff standing, a gobbet of pig's knuckle between his molars through which rabid scums pit tie dribbles. ··· More than 1,000 Social Registerites and hangers-on clanked, rustled and jangled into Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to feel real regal at the annual Imperial Ball, sponsored for charity by Chrysler
Corp. and boasting a stage show that glittered with some $10 million worth of borrowed jewelry. Some costumed lady guests were marvels to behold, but none greater than the international set's large-hearted partygiver, Elsa Maxwell, 73, bedecked with such garnish as one of the world's biggest rocks (a 337-k. sapphire) in her guise of Russia's Empress Catherine the Great. Also gone regal was Metropolitan Opera Soprano Maria Meneghini Callas, playing her greatest nonsinging role as Hatshepsut, an 18th Dynasty Queen of Egypt. Prattled Columnist Maxwell just before the ball: "Maria and I, gentle as ewe lambs, will be side by side in the Parade of Empresses. What an amusing ending to one of my greatest 'feuds.' "* ··· A Paris court ruled that the public sale of an unexpurgated, 28-volume set of the complete works of the Marquis de Sade (TIME, Dec. 31) was an "outrage to morality." Paris Publisher Jean-Jacques Pau-vert, who had rashly tried to peddle "to specialists" the marquis' encyclopedia of all-out sadism, was let off with a $571 fine and a court order dictating that every last page of the pornography involved be destroyed.