Change of Pace
In Paris, a blonde authoress-movie director, Nicole Vedrès, was shooting a film with an all-star cast: Painter Pablo Picasso, Novelist André Gide, Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, Architect Le Corbusier, Writer Jacques Prévert, Atomic Scientist Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Their roles required them to enact themselves at work and at play, chatting about what the world was coming to. Said Picasso, who played quiet scenes with Gide (see cut) and mugged with Prévert: "We had a terrific time."
With the lights doused by a storm and his wife about to give birth, Notre Dame Football Coach Frank Leahy, 41, urgently called two doctors to his Indiana home. They arrived to find that Leahy, working by candlelight, had already safely delivered the Leahy's sixth child, fourth boy ("a fullback, I think"). The coach's critique: "If you think a football game is exciting, you should have been at our house last night."
Having decided last spring that Knowsley Hall, the old family seat, would have to pay its own way, the Earl of Derby cheerfully counted up $22,000 in public admissions over the summer to the 400-year-old showplace in Lancashire (Price scale: "adults, 50¢; children, 25¢). "Next year," promised Lord Derby, "I shall reduce the charge for children."
Broadway Matinee Idol Ezio (South Pacific) Pinza, 57, had something new to put him farther ahead of the theater's other romantic leads: his first grandchild, a boy, born to his daughter, Metropolitan Opera Soprano Claudia Pinza, 24.
In Cooperstown, N.Y., Baseball's Hall of Fame conscientiously wrote to Philadelphia Phillies First Baseman Eddie Waitkus for the .22 slug that an overenthusiastic girl fan fired into his lung in June.
Lorenzo ("The Magnificent") de' Medici had cause to be restless in his grave: a go-getting U.S. real-estate agency took a full-page ad in Town & Country offering bourgeois buyers the sumptuous Villa Medici that he built overlooking Florence in 1460. Asking price: $150,000.
Retired National League Umpire Bill Klem, 75, smitten by his share of oaths and pop bottles in almost 50 years of calling decisions, was on the receiving end of a new kind of demonstration. At a Polo Grounds ceremony arranged by baseball writers, damp-eyed Bill Klem caught a broadside of cheers and gifts from fans, players and managers.
Slings & Arrows
After threatening suicide from a locked hotel room which she had fortified with a large supply of sleeping pills and a bottle of whisky, Whodunit Authoress Craig (Home Sweet Homicide) Rice, 41, had an explanation for the cops: it was all just a plot twist to win back her estranged fifth husband, Henry W. De Mott Jr., 29, whom she was suing for divorce. "It was a foolish thing to do," she admitted, "but sounded like a good idea at the time."
In Cannes, while his great & good friend, Hollywood's Merle Oberon, 38, watched his private plane take off for Venice, wealthy Italian Count Giorgio Cini, 30, was killed in a crash when he flew low to buzz the airstrip. Cinemactress Oberon cried: "My life is finished. There's no point in going on."