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As it must to all model Hollywood couples, the living end came last week for restless Actor-Director José Ferrer, 49, and homebody Songstress Rosemary Clooney, 33. After bearing five little Ferrers in eight outwardly placid years of marriage, Rosie called on that grim reaper of cinematic matrimony, Lawyer Jerry Giesler, to file for divorce on grounds of extreme cruelty. "This will come as a surprise to all our friends," wept Rosie, "but it was no sudden decision on my part. Joe and I have had a difference of opinion as to a way of life, and for the children's sake, we feel it is best . . ."
For the benefit of a London newsman bemused by U.S. argot, Novelist Norman (The Naked and the Dead) Mailer, 38, set out to distinguish between hipsters and beatniks. Although the two groups "share a common experience and understand each other's language." pontificated Mailer, "they're utterly different. The hipster is a man of action, always on the move; the beatnik is contemplative, an amateur philosopher. Among world figures today, Kennedy is hip but won't admit it and Khrushchev is hip but doesn't know it." What about British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan? "Irreclaimably square."
Flying into Rio de Janeiro on a lecture tour, Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, 57, irritably denied that he felt any guilt for serving as top scientist on the first A-bomb project. "I carry no weight on my conscience," insisted the white-haired director of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, whose security clearance for participation in U.S. nuclear development was withdrawn in 1954. "Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has now changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of government, not of scientists." But in the Oppenheimer scheme of things, soldiers, unlike scientists, apparently do not enjoy the right to leave political decisions to their governments. Said Oppenheimer: "I would like to see a general strike by the officers of all the armed forces on earth, refusing to drop nuclear bombs or to push the fatal buttons."
Washington's prestigious Metropolitan Club—whose roster includes luminaries from Congress, the Cabinet, Embassy Row and the Pentagon, but nary a Negro—last week lost Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. "It is inconceivable to me, in this day and age," read Bobby's resignation letter, "that the privileges of this club, which holds such a unique and peculiar post in the nation's capital, would be denied to anyone merely because of his race."
Ill lay: ranking Republican Senator Styles Bridges, 63, who, while recuperating from a lung ailment at his Concord, N.H., home, suffered a "moderately severe" heart attack.
Propelled by his special-formula liquid fuel—brandy with a champagne chaser—Irish Author Brendan (The Hostage) Behan blasted clean out of the Celtic atmosphere, confided to Dublin drinking partners that he would like to live in the U.S. "It's a very free place to write in," he explained, "and there's the advantage that no one knows what you're writing about anyway."