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From London last week came details of Aly Khan's will, which, under "the Shia Moslem law, which is my personal law," ordered several specific bequests, then granted two-thirds of the remainder of the estimated $800 million estate to heirs, including Princess Yasmin, 10, his daughter by Second Wife Rita Hayworth. Among the specifics: $280,000 and his Chantilly, France, villa to elegant French Fashion Model Bettina, 35, his constant companion since 1955; $14,000 to Sybilla Szczeniowska, 38, a blonde New York fashion designer who met Aly 20 years ago in Cairo; and $56,000 to her Cairo-born son, Marek, 16, a Manhattan private school junior, who recollected &quo;seeing the prince three or four times in my life. When he was in New York, he used to come to see us, and he gave my brother and me $50 when he did. The prince wanted to be my godfather, but it was against his religion. But he was always a spiritual godfather to me."
In 1920, State Department Code Clerk James Thurber, then 25, defected into journalism, has harbored ever since an unrealized ambition: "One friend of mine put it very well when he said, 'That s.o.b. has been trying to get on the stage for 40 years.' " Last week when a star of his long-running Broadway revue, A Thurber Carnival, abruptly quit, the author-cartoonist trouped into the breach. With only two rehearsals, under Director Burgess Meredith ("Now I have him at my mercy; I can tell him that as an actor he has no right to change the author's words"), Thurber played himself with fluffless finesse in a twelve-minute sketch about a writer embroiled in a frustrating correspondence with his bureaucratic publisher. Since the role calls for him to be seated throughout, Thurber's blindness was no handicap, and Meredith felt that the part "lit an old fuse in him; he seems to have come up with some peculiar stage ability." Equally enthused, the New York Times critic labeled the actor "the perfect Thurber." Drinking it all in, the Great White Way's white-haired new hope announced that he would remain in the role for the rest of the Broadway run, might even go with the show on the road.
For the longest papal junket (more than 100 miles round trip) since Pius IX's horsecarriage tour of the Roman countryside in 1857, Pope John XXIII, 79, climbed into the armchair seat of his Chrysler, donated by U.S. Catholics, at 6:15 a.m. one morning last week. The purpose of the trip: a sentimental journey to the seminary at Roccantica where 56 years ago he said the second mass of his career. After admiring the olive-groved Sabine Hills through the plexiglas top of his speeding (frequently at more than 60 miles per hour) limousine, the Pope was greeted by townspeople and papal Secretary of State Domenico Cardinal Tardini, himself a former student at the seminary. Arriving at the chapel, His Holiness seemed disappointed at not finding the portrait of St. Francis he still remembered (it had been stored during World War II and never put back). Later, before presenting a gift to his alma mater and taking coffee and cakes with his hosts, the Pope addressed 85 awed seminarians on the school's tennis court, remarked. "Fifty years ago we were here, and now you are here. But as you can see, we are not too old."