Emily, the pet five-foot python that Geraldine Chaplin, 20, used to carry around Europe in a sack, evidently taught her something. On location in Spain, where she is playing the role of Tonia, the demure, bourgeois wife of Dr. Zhivago, the great Charlie's daughter suddenly assumed a herpetic pose. But as Geraldine said once, "For a young dancer like myself, what a treat it is to watch a snake move. Their suppleness and their elegance are incomparable."
It was, she said, a sort of "bargain" between her and John F. Kennedy. Luella Hennessey had served the Kennedy family as a private nurse for some 25 years, attended at the births of 23 of their children, helped care for Patriarch Joseph Kennedy early in his long illness. In 1963 the President persuaded her to give up full-time nursing and go to college to study public health so that she could work with retarded children, a special concern of the Kennedy family. She agreed, and last week she received her bachelor of science degree at Boston College. Senator Teddy Kennedy, whom she helped nurse back to health after his plane crash last summer, was on hand to give her a hug and a kiss. "The President said he would come to my graduation if I got my degree," she said. "I guess he'll know I'm getting it."
There he stood, that moaning old Yank, Elvis Presley, 30, firmly in the No. 1 spot on London's Hit Parade with what the trade calls a ."religiose"—Crying in the Chapel. And were the Beatles crying any more than usual down there in 24th place with Ticket to Ride? No, no, no. For when the Queen's annual birthday honors list came out, there they were, among the 1,800 names: Ringo Starr, 24, John Lennon, 24, Paul McCartney, 22, and George Harrison, 22, all appointed members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, thus entitled to put M.B.E. after their names and wear a silver lapel pin inscribed "For God and Empire." Her Majesty doesn't explain why she does these things. But after all, those boys have done a lot for Britain's balance of payments.
A little like introducing chicken soup to matzo balls, perhaps, but on opening night at Jaffa's Alhambra Theater, practically everyone who was anyone in Israel was there: Premier Lev! Eshkol, Foreign Minister Golda Meir and the rest of the nation's official mishpachah. And when the curtain came down on the Hebrew adaptation of Broadway's Fiddler on the Roof, who should rush backstage but the Premier himself. Said Eshkol after toasting the cast: "Nu, nu, it's not exactly Sholom Aleichem, but I have never enjoyed an evening in the theater so much in my life." Israel's most formidable critic, Chaim Gamzu—whose last name is now the idiom for "roast"—naturally complained that the musical "is sunk in cauldrons of schmaltz." So what else did he expect, bubbled Joe Stein, who wrote the Broadway book: "Schmaltz is not exactly a Japanese invention, you know."