The feet were the hardest part. First there was a gold ring to fit onto each big toe, and then two tinkling anklets to snap into place. Finally the soles of her feet were painted red. But it was not just for kicks. Heiress Barbara Mutton, 51, a Protestant, was marrying Laotian Painter-Chemist Prince Raymond Doan Vinh Na Champassak, 48, a Buddhist, and they were doing it his way. Babs had never tried a Buddhist ceremony, and so this time around it was a sari affair at her $1,500,000 estate near Cuernavaca, Mexico. There were seven tiers to the wedding cake, not in honor of her seven husbands but in honor of the groom's rank in Laos, and when the violin-serenaded reception was over, she was Princess Barbara Hutton Mdivani Haugwitz-Reventlow Grant Troubetzkoy Rubirosa Von Cramm Na Champassak.
Boob tube, idiot box, or whatever else people call it, television is responsible for the bacon David Brinkley, 43, brings home, and the ham-on-wry commentator felt moved to pay homage to its glories. But what to say? "Television," he finally advised some University of North Carolina students, "is the only thing in the world that is punctual." People, planes and trains are late, he continued thoughtfully, but TV is on time. "It may be lousy, but it's on time."
Ach du lie her! And the archivist in East Berlin hurried off to tell his bosses. He had just unearthed a copy of Marlene Dietrich's long-missing birth certificate. Unable to keep the secret, the
East Germans passed it on to West Berlin authorities. They tattled, too, and soon the word was out that Marvelous Marlene, whose age has been pegged as low as 54, was really 62 years old last Dec. 27. Marlene's reaction to it all? There won't be any, if her pals have their way. Said Old Friend Major Donald Neville-Willing in England, where she's on a business trip: "I don't think she knows about the story. She doesn't read the papers here and doesn't watch television. I don't think her old friends, good friends, will mention it to her. It probably is true, but so what. She looks 40, and that's that." Quite!
For ten days the prisoners of Rome's Regina Coeli prison anxiously studied their catechisms. Then at 8 one morning last week, Pope Paul VI, 66, arrived to celebrate Mass, the first modern Pope ever to do so in a jail (Pope John XXIII visited the same prison in 1958, but did not say Mass). Four prisoners assisted Paul at the ceremony, and more than 600 inmates received Communion. Afterward, with the men pressing freely around him, the Pontiff was moved to tears, as he told them: "I have come to kindle in each of you a flame that may have gone out." When he left after 21 hours, he took with him a kneeling stand made for him at the prison—and an album containing brief declarations of faith from almost all the 1,110 inmates.