Old boxers never dive; they just fade away into legitimate businesses. Last week James Joseph ("Gene") Tunney, 62, world heavyweight champion from 1926 until he retired as an undefeated millionaire in 1928, was elected a director of Alleghany Corp., which is presumably strengthening its corner for a proxy fight with Texas' hard-swinging Murchison brothers (TIME, Oct. 3). In another corner, Rocky (Somebody Up There Likes Me) Graziano, 38, middleweight champion of a decade ago, was named president of a Long Island bowling center owned by New York's Acme Missiles & Construction Corp.
Apparently convinced that the French army will keep on trying to make a soldier of Yves Saint-Laurent for his full 27-month stint as a draftee, the House of Dior last week named his replacement as the world's most publicized fashion designer: Marc Bohan, 34, in charge of Dior's successful London operation in the past two years. In contrast to Saint-Laurent's extreme, erratic styles, Bohan—first married man and father ever to hold the lofty Dior post—is notable for designing clothes that consistently prove their wearers have bosoms and waists. The job is Bohan's until Saint-Laurent leaves the army, perhaps longer.
After going official rounds in Washington, including a state reception at the White House, Japan's Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko fell into a vacation mood and headed for Manhattan. From a City Hall welcome, Akihito, a noted ichthyophile, dashed a block away to a commercial aquarium-stock store, purchased some rare breeds of fish (imported to await his arrival) and arranged for them to be aboard his chartered plane when he flies back fo Tokyo this week. It was not on the crown prince's official schedule, but he was anxious to say hello to an old acquaintance, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, who lives in Manhattan's Waldorf Towers, only two floors away from the suite assigned to the royal couple.
Near the French Riviera town of Menton, a photographer approached a pretty, sex-hexed celebrity, and asked to take her picture. "Leave me in peace," was the reply. "I'm going to die anyway." A few hours later, Brigrrte Bardot made an apparently serious—and heavily headlined —attempt to die. In the garden of a friend's pink villa, a vineyard keeper found Brigitte unconscious beside a well. In the beam of his flashlight he saw Brigitte: "Her eyes were closed, her teeth slightly parted, and her arms were red with blood." It was her 26th birthday—and it ended up in a neurological clinic in Nice, where the diagnosis was barbiturate poisoning, plus slight wrist lacerations. Brigitte's periodically estranged husband, Cinemactor Jacques Charrier, far off on the other side of Southern France, in Biarritz, where he had gone after their latest spat, jumped in a car to drive to her side. At week's end the aging "Sex Kitten" of French moviedom was recovering. Paris' deadly serious Le Monde, customarily oblivious to BB, accorded her a sort of ghoulish obituary-in-life: "Once upon a time there was a starlet who saw happiness only in glory. She had glory beyond all expectations. Even her name vanished and remained only as two initials: BB. Glory devoured everything: private life, peace, human personality—real or imagined."