People 1982: A History of This Section

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entry: You Can Do the Cube (Penguin; $1.95) by Patrick Bossert, 13, a London schoolboy who discovered the cube only this spring during a family ski vacation in Switzerland. Within five days he had mastered the monster, and later began selling his schoolmates a four-page, mimeographed tip sheet for 450. An alert editor at Penguin saw a copy and persuaded the prodigy to turn pro. The 112-page result contains three dozen "tricks" for solving the cube (using logic rather than math), as well as a chapter on "Cube Maintenance" (to loosen a stiff cube, "put a blob of Vaseline on the mechanism"). With 250,000 copies of the cubist's book in print, a Penguin executive marvels: "It's the biggest, runaway, immediate success we have had since we published Lady Chatterley's Lover in paperback."

1982: Our story begins in Boston, nearly 60 years ago, with a high school girl. "I took all sorts of jobs to earn money," she remembers. "I was asked to pose for a statue of Spring, for a fountain." The lass obliged, in the buff. "It was lovely, beautiful. I had the perfect figure for it," she says. "I've heard it's still up there in a park some place, though I've never seen it since." The leaves of the calendar tumble to reveal the present. The young lady, now at the other end of life, is Bette Davis, 74, and she is playing Alice Vanderbilt, the imperious matriarch of that gilded clan in Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last, an NBC mini-series for next season. The scene now shifts back to Boston, where Davis' comments spark a two-week, city-wide search for the statue. Finally, Cornelius Vermeule, curator of classical art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, pieces together the available clues and concludes that the lost relic is in a seldom-trod corner in the museum's basement. The subject of the fuss, a 92-in. bronze statue titled Young Diana, is a somewhat androgynous-looking nymph. Vermeule's professional opinion: "There is indeed a strong resemblance—her profile, the contours of her face, and her eyes."