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To the 18-year-old Norwegian maid, her employers, the Nelson Rockefellers, were very odd. One night, when they were late, she left dinner on the stove and went off to a party in Brooklyn. Next day Nelson's first wife, Mary Clark Rockefeller, demonstrated the helplessness of the very rich. "AnneMarie, what happened to you last night? I had to take my husband to Hamburg Heaven." That was only the beginning, as Anne-Marie Rasmussen reveals in her autobiography There Was Once a Time. Contrary to the American Dream, Second Son Steven had no sooner married her in 1959 than they lived unhappily ever after. It was psychoanalysts for both and not a laugh in between. "The Rockefellers are not funloving," recalls Anne-Marie, who divorced Steven in 1970. "Their idea of a good time is a serious discussion." Now 36 and divorced from her second husband, Businessman Robert Krogstad, Anne-Marie lives with her three Rockefeller children in New York's Westchester County. She has become tough-minded about her ten-year sojourn among one of the country's richest families. Said she last week: "Steven wanted a simple country girl and found himself with someone more complex than himself."
"I can't bear to listen to myself," said Mabel Mercer on her 75th birthday. But every smart pop singer in the past 50 years has listened and learned from Mercer how to shape and pace a lyric. Her unique style of talking a song was developed to compensate for her failing soprano voice. Now, she says, "it's just a noise." Enough, however, to hold some 500 guests spellbound at her birthday party in Manhattan. Mabel's star pupil could not make the party, but he did not forget the singer who "taught me everything I know." Frank Sinatra sent a bouquet and a note: "I love you, Mabel. Have a marvelous day." -
Hey there, cutes!/ Put on your dancing boots/ and come dance with me. This is the call that frustrated Tap Dancer Barbara Walters had been waiting for. She got it finally last week when she filled in for Johnny Carson on the Tonight show. Guest Gene Kelly graciously appraised Barbara's potential. After a few turns round the set, Barbara asked Gene to check her waltz clog (a tap step) because "I can't click my heels together properly." In no time Gene was showing Barbara how to tap and it was clear that Barbara's latent ambitions were aflame. "It hasn't been the field I've made it in," she acknowledged. "But it's never too late."