Born. To Peter Fonda, 23, Henry's gangling cinemactor son (The Victors), and Susan Brewer Fonda, 23: their first child, a daughter (and first grandchild for Henry); in Hollywood.
Married. Joan Fontaine, 46, best remembered as Laurence Olivier's bedeviled bride in Rebecca; and Alfred Wright Jr., 48, senior editor of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED; she for the fourth time, he for the third; in Elkton, Md.
Marriage Revealed. Louise de Koven ("Wendy") Wanamaker, 22, daughter of John Rodman Wanamaker, chairman of Philadelphia's Wanamaker department store chain, herself an accomplished horsewoman; and Richard Hendriks Jr., 27, formerly the family horse trainer (now employed by New York's P. G. Johnson Stables), the son of a New Jersey butcher; some time in the last half of 1963, but just when and where everyone declines to say.
Divorced. By Virginia Sinclair Mdivani, 48, daughter of the late Oil Tycoon Harry Sinclair: Prince David Mdi-vani, 63, Czarist emigre, last of the three "Marrying Mdivanis"; after 19 years of marriage, one son; on grounds of mental cruelty (she said he harassed her continually); in Los Angeles.
Died. Gerald de Bary, 37, Swiss-born director (since 1955) of the Salt Lake City zoo; 30 hours after being bitten by an African puff adder, one of the world's deadliest snakes; in Salt Lake City. Suffering from a bad case of flu, Bary was about to clean the adder's cage when he felt dizzy, thrust an arm through the open door, attempting to steady himself—whereupon the adder struck. Said De Bary, shortly before he died: "Don't blame the snake. He was only protecting himself."
Died. Alan Ladd, 50, tough-guy movie hero, a slight and, in real life, amiable Californian who hit the marquees in 1942 as the suave, trench-coated hood in This Gun for Hire (with Veronica Lake), played much the same cool role some 200 times thereafter, winning brickbats from the critics (except in Shane) but such dogged admiration from the fans that, as he once said, "every time Paramount wants to meet the payroll, they start an Alan Ladd picture"; found dead in bed; at his Palm Springs, Calif., home.
Died. Lionel Clark Sternberger, 56, proprietor of a Los Angeles steak house (The Rite Spot) who, at the hungry age of 16, experimentally dropped a slab of American cheese on a sizzling hamburger while helping out at his father's sandwich shop in Pasadena, thereby inventing the cheeseburger; of complications following diabetes; in Glendale, Calif.
Died. Stuart Nathaniel Lake, 74, feature writer for the Saturday Evening Post whose 1931 biography of Gunfighter Wyatt Earp, based on interviews with Earp before his death in 1929, sold half a million copies, inspired two movies and the TV series, established its author as an authority on the Old West despite stuffier historians' sniffs that it was "a fictionalized glorification of a tinhorn outlaw"; of a ruptured aorta; in San Diego, Calif.