To some, the long beatlemanes and Carnaby Street clothes for boys do smack of something girlish. Nonsense, protested Social Critic Marya Mannes, 61, in a commentary delivered at a Manhattan conference of the National Council of Women. "Hair is both manly and womanly, and the shock of hair on a boy is far more virile and decorative than the crew cut," she said. As for the fashions, observed Marya, who dresses sedately enough herself: "If it's sometimes hard to tell boys and girls apart in boots and sweaters and pants and hair —well, to some of us they spell a wonderful freedom and comfort and an honest sense of the body." Fab.
What a night at the Burtons! Charlie Brown, the beloved Abyssinian cat of Elizabeth Taylor, 34, had slipped outdoors and got lost on the grounds of the rented villa in Rome where Liz, Dick and the menagerie are staying while they shoot The Taming of the Shrew. Next morning at 5, Charlie Brown awakened the family with anguished meowing from the top of a fir tree, and out trooped Liz, Dick and butler to the rescue. The butler bravely ascended the fir, but when he started down with Charlie, the cat squirmed loose, plummeting onto Liz's head and misbehaving on the spot. Then the butler's ladder fell, also clonking Charlie's mistress. Good grief. Charlie Brown!
For a moment, the trip was a fright. As Britain's Queen Mother Elizabeth, 65, rode into Christchurch, New Zealand, a shot cracked somewhere behind the crowd. Police raced through the neighborhood until they found four young boys playing with a rifle that had discharged, slightly wounding a housewife in the crowd. Unruffled, the Queen Mum went trout fishing in Lake Wanaka, catching nothing, despite her fine fly-fisher's wrist. She did set some sort of local record as the only angler who ever waded in wearing hip boots, sports jacket, and a large string of pearls.
"I have no stomach for fighting with widows," announced Conservative Polemicist William F. Buckley Jr., 40. He may have played a bit rough with the widow's late husband, Yale Law School Professor Fowler V. Harper, charging four years ago in his National Review that Harper had given "aid and comfort" to Communist causes by lending his name to a Viet Nam protest petition. Harper died last year before his $500,000 libel suit against Buckley was resolved, but his widow pressed on. Finally, Buckley put the matter to rest by settling for $13,750 in New York State Supreme Court, thus clearing the decks for the next big hassle. Nobel Prizewinner Linus Pauling, labeled a "fellow traveler" by the Review, reported that he will appeal the dismissal of his $1,000,000 libel suit against Buckley and the magazine.
Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins. —The Song of Solomon: 7:3
Yea, said San Francisco's Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike, who has the habit of unconventional utterance. While he was speaking at the University of California at Berkeley, someone inevitably brought up the subject of San Francisco's famed topless dancers. Preached Pike, in the spirit of the Song of Songs: "We must always be in a position of thanksgiving to God for the beauties of his handiwork."