In 43 years, the presidential yacht has ferried a panoply of kings, emperors, ambassadors and other important personages along the Potomac—but rarely a crowd like this. Two dozen youngsters, most of them from poor families around Washington, followed wide-eyed behind Pat Nixon on a tour of the 104-ft.-long vessel, now named Sequoia, as a Navy crew piloted them downstream on a two-hour voyage. It was the first of a series of 14 cruises the First Lady plans for children this summer. "I thought it could be put to better use," said she, dishing out soda pop and other goodies while a Marine Corps combo and a folk singer provided music. The only sour note came from a National Park Service director who remarked at one point that it would take 20 years to clean up the pollution they were gliding over.
It was only a question of time. Carlo Ponti Jr., long-awaited son of the Italian producer and Actress Sophia Loren, will become a contributor to the family cinematic combine at the tender age of six months. In I Girasoli (The Sunflowers), a Ponti production now filming in Moscow, Carlo Jr. will portray Sophia's infant son. "I managed to convince Carlo Sr. to allow our son to work in the movie so I could have my baby with me all the time," she said. "I don't want to be away from him for a moment." The script offers an arresting contrast to the Pontis' fireside felicity. An Italian woman, traveling on her earnings as a prostitute, tracks down her war-prisoner husband in Russia only to find him married to another woman.
"All the inadequacies and weaknesses just blare out at you," complained the young artist as he viewed his own one-man show at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Me. Jamie Wyeth, 23, Andrew's talented and modest son, had hitched a ride with a lobsterman from his home on Monhegan Island, and almost wished he hadn't come. Even his 1967 portrait of the late John F. Kennedy was disappointing in retrospect. "I'm terribly unsatisfied with it," said Jamie, who never saw J.F.K. in the flesh and completed the portrait from photographs and extensive sketches of the President's two brothers. "It's purely interpretive. I have nothing to equate it with. I don't know whether it is like him or unlike him." Still, the young artist must be doing something right: he has been commissioned by NASA authorities to join Robert Rauschenberg, John Meigs and William Thon at Cape Kennedy to sketch his impressions of this week's scheduled Apollo 11 blastoff to the moon.