Irreverently telling her mother before she told it to Louella, Dancer Juliet Prowse, 25, phoned her South African home with "heartsore" news. Informed by Fiancé Frank Sinatra, 46, that "there's millions of girls who'd give up work to marry me," the lissome cineminx had decided that she wasn't one of them. But there was consolation amid the wreckage of her six-week trial engagement. "You have to hand it to Juliet," confided a Sinatra intimate. "For all those weeks, there was never any other girl." Besides, the career that Juliet had declined to sacrifice on the altar of Frankie was looking appreciably more promising. Booked at a Las Vegas casino before the engagement for a scant $6,750 a week, she has just signed for a second Vegas appearance at $20,000 a week.
Less than 24 hours after he was sprung from jail on $100,000 bail, pending appeal of a 15-year tax-dodging rap, California Gambling Ganglord Mickey Cohen, 50, was accused of clobbering a Teamsters' picket with his own signboard. The donnybrook, which the short-fused mobster attributed to an anti-Semitic slur, was blamed by his foe on Cohen's unprovoked truculence (sample printable quote: "I own this local, and you are out"). This time Mickey only had to drop a niggling $1,050 bond to return to the suburban Van Nuys bungalow he shares with Showgirl Sandy Hagan, 22—an arrangement, Cohen assures his stirred-up bourgeois neighbors, that "has been okayed by her parents and my parents."
Looking for easy laughs, several score men of Harvard crowded into a Cambridge common room to listen to a lecture on "The Actor and the Modern Theater" by a speaker who had never finished high school. But after hearing her modestly ponder everything from her own Hollywood career ("I was not happy being a blonde bombshell and all that jazz") to modern psychological drama ("Maybe the unnatural things in life are the only safe ones to write about these days"), the Harvards gave Actress Shelley Winters, 39, a standing ovation. Shelley's reaction: "One of the proudest achievements of my life. I'll brag about it."
Winging into St. Petersburg with parasol at the ready, Major Stockholder Joan Whitney Payson joined Manager Charles Dillon Stengel for baseball's least auspicious event of the week: the launching of the National League's fledgling New York Mets. Asked if he thought he could alchemize a champion from the best dross that Whitney money could buy, Casey instinctively retorted: "I expect to win every day." Then, from the most voluble player in the league came an uncharacteristic halt in the Mach 2 verbiage. "Maybe," sighed Casey, "I'll be shell-shocked."