For once all her troubles were small ones, which made a nice change of pace in the saga of Singer Judy Garland, 40. First, Judy flew to London to toast her new film, / Could Go On Singing, and buss British Juvenile Gregory Phillips, 15, who plays her son. So far, so good. Then back to Manhattan, where real-life daughter Liza Minnelli, 17, appearing on TV with Jack Paar and struggling through rehearsals for an off-Broadway musical, had fractured a bone in her foot. Finally the trolley ran out of gas, and Judy, laid low by flu in her St. Regis Hotel suite, couldn't have felt less like singing.
From his plush refuge in suburban Madrid, onetime Argentine Strongman Juan Peron, 67, last fall penned a petition to the Bishop of Madrid, begging remission of his 1955 excommunication, which followed many outrages against the church, climaxed by his expulsion of two Catholic prelates from Argentina. To the Vatican went Peron's appeal, accompanied by a recommendation from the bishop which convinced the Holy See that here was a true repentant. The request was approved, and the black sheep is back in the fold.
Sold recently on the New York Stock Exchange were 75,000 shares, or $3,675,000 worth of common stock, in the Columbia Broadcasting System by Board Chairman William S. Paley, 61. His remaining CBS investment: $66,000 shares worth $44,382,500.
Quoth the sunburned satirist: "I look like a peeling billboard." Thus out of the bush near Nairobi, Kenya, strewing perels of witdom to mark his trail, came a hornrimmed, slyly befuddled big white hunter known to civilized nations as Humorist S. J. Perelman, 59. Having bagged a Broadway comedy hit. The Beauty Part, Perelman was an author in search of "four magazine articles." At the end of his Land-Roving safari through Kenya, he caromed up to London, hoping later to join a tiger shoot in India, then on to Burma and Bangkok to see what the jet-set drifters were doing for laughs.
Ill lay: the Right Rev. Arthur Lichtenberger, 63, Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, with Parkinson's disease, continuing in office on a severely limited schedule of appointments and public speeches; Bette Davis, 54. 1963 Oscar nominee, confined to her room at Manhattan's Hotel Plaza, battling flu; Ted Weems, 62. bandleader, on the critical list after an emergency tracheotomy to aid breathing (tentative diagnosis: stroke), at Hillcrest Medical Center, Tulsa.
Some old tunes are apt to sound mighty familiar when the Tommy Dorsey band goes touring this May with its new featured vocalist, Frank Sinatra Jr., 19, son of Sinatra's first marriage. Raised by his mother Nancy in Beverly Hills, Frank Jr. quietly attended local public and private schools, still plans to continue drama studies at the University of Southern California. But once he cuts loose on the songs that Daddy taught him, history may well repeat itself. During an impromptu public appearance at Disneyland last summer, one youngish matron came up to the bandstand and purred: "That was almost like the Paramount Theater in 1944."