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Eighteen years after he designed the WAVES' uniforms for the U.S. Navy, Chicago-born Couturier Mainbocher, a youthful 69, got a formal token of appreciation from the ladies he clad so smartly. In Dallas, he was given the Navy's Meritorious Public Service Citation—the Navy's second highest civilian award and the first ever to go to a fashion designer. Said Mainbocher (real name: Main Rousseau Bocher): "It was not an easy assignment. One problem I did not have—color. It had to be Navy blue."
Journeying to Hyannisport, Mass, some weeks ago, the Central Intelligence Agency's hearty Director Allen W. Dulles briefed Democratic Candidate Jack Kennedy on the dark doings behind the Iron Curtain and elsewhere, as instructed to by President Eisenhower. One Kennedy man was moved to mutter: "He keeps giving all this terrible information. But how can you get worried? There's Allen with his tennis racket in his bag." Last week the man who knows more hair-curling secrets about the Russians than any other U.S. citizen traveled to Texas to brief Lyndon Baines Johnson. No tennis. But there was Allen relaxing in a lawn chair, chatting pleasantly with Johnson's wife Lady Bird, and meditatively purring his pipe, looking on top of the whole spy-covered world.
Groping for a new-angle tourist attraction, the Calabrian mountain resort of Villaggio Mancuso three years ago hit upon an "Oscars of Two Worlds" theme, whooped it up as an affair honoring two disparate callings of folks—actors and scientists. But there was chaos at the village's annual ceremonies last week when the twain met. Appearing in a low-cut gown, Cinemactress Sophia Loren was grabbed by fans, who tried to hoist her on their shoulders, was rescued kicking and bellowing by the cops. In the confusion, the Oscar for medicine went to Sophia, and a West German medical researcher, Professor Johannes Kellin, who should have got it, got a beauty prize instead.
To 293 Americans, living and dead, who helped Japan advance from feudalism to democracy in the past century, went a special commendation from a committee of 14 Japanese business and political leaders. Among those honored (they or their survivors got a certificate of appreciation and a lacquer picture of the first Japanese ship to visit the U.S.): Commodore Matthew Perry, who opened up the country to the world; President Ulysses S. Grant, who aided Emperor Meiji's modernization program; John Foster Dulles, who negotiated the Japanese peace treaty; Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who built Tokyo's quakeproof Imperial Hotel; General of the Army Douglas MacArthur; Mrs. Elizabeth Vining, ex-tutor of Crown Prince Akihito; and three Rockefellers, the late Philanthropists John D. Sr. and John D. Jr., and John D. Rockefeller III, head of the Rockefeller Foundation.