People, Oct. 28, 1957

Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

The rising tide of inflation is lapping at movieland’s loftiest crags, according to Gossipist Sheilah Graham, who cheerfully prattled: “Mickey Rooney will try marriage again with [fourth] wife Elaine. With the high cost of alimony, Hollywood males are finding it cheaper to reconcile.”

In Colombo, Soviet Ambassador to Ceylon Vladimir Yakovlev, possibly noting how fashionably his U.S. opposite number, Ambassador Maxwell Gluck, is getting about town, ordered the same brand of jalopy−an air-conditioned Buick.

Applicants for a marriage license in Manhattan: Hotel Scion G. David Schine, 30, the most public private in the U.S. Army during the 1954 Army-McCarthy tournament, and Sweden’s statuesque (36-23-36) Hillevi Rombin, 24, renowned in 1955 as Miss Universe.

Evangelist Billy Graham was unwarily inspecting his flock of three sheep near his North Carolina mountain home. A few seconds later, Farmer Graham picked himself up, cut and bruised, some fifty feet down the mountainside. The winner: a surly Suffolk ram, scoring three hits, no errors. Said Billy, from his bed of pain: “I turned the other cheek!”

On a street corner in Manhattan’s Times Square, a bronze tablet marked the site of the birth 69 years ago of the late Playwright Eugene O’Neill. A few years before he died in 1953, O’Neill was sent a photograph of his bygone birthplace, then a family hotel, since razed. In his thank-you note, the prize-laden (a Nobel and four Pulitzers) dramatist quipped about a figure, leaning against a lamppost in the picture’s foreground, having “a bun on,” was moved to reminisce: “In the old days, when I was born, a man−especially one from Kilkenny−went on a five-year drunk and finished by licking four cops, and then went home to raise hell because dinner was late.”

A tall handsome youth raced through the rain at London Airport to a waiting plane. With His Highness Prince Karim, fourth Ago Khan, 20, and 49th Imam of the world’s Ismaili Moslems, was his father, Prince Aly Khan, bypassed by the late Aga in deciding his successor. Two days later in the African city of Dar Es Salaam in Tanganyika, on the western shore of the Indian Ocean, Aga Khan IV was acclaimed in the first of many installation ceremonies that will take him on a year’s traveling in Africa, the Mideast and southern Asia. The sun blazed down, and after some 20,000 faithful chanted “Allah Akbar,” the young Aga received a signet ring, a robe of many colors, a golden turban, the 49-disked gold chain of Omnipotent Priest and a long curved sword of justice. The pageantry of installation, the Aga’s initial assumption of temporal and spiritual leadership over some 20 million widely scattered Ismailis, seemed at times more like a U.S. college May fete than a religious rite. It ended with a boy scout band, possibly fresh out of nonrepeat tunes, playing Swanee River.

Among other peril-frought trends in the U.S., Italy’s sleek, slick Couturiere Simonetta observed a “dangerous” tendency among U.S. women to ignore fashion trends and wear what they look best in. Here on her first U.S. visit since 1955, Simonetta crossly jangled her charm bracelet at a New York Timeslady and cried: “All over the country I have seen what I have never seen before . . . Where is the three-quarter sleeve? Where is the lithe waistline, the close-fitting hipline? The shorter hemline? These are not being worn, although we presented them in the last collections!” But, after a careful survey of passing silhouettes, she did have a good word, too: “Last time I was here it was talk, talk, talk of diet. Evidently it was not all talk. American figures are surprisingly good. And everyone wears such marvelous girdles.”

To ballyhoo the first birthday of his Oscar-smothered epic movie Around the World in 80 Days, Showman Mike Todd held “a little private party” in Manhattan’s ballooned and festooned Madison Square Garden. On the promise of a mighty spectacle plus food, champagne and free gifts (from Japanese dolls to a Cessna airplane), Pitchman Todd conned 18,000 suckers in evening wear into the Garden, conned CBS-TV into paying some $300,000 to carry the shambles to the nation, conned most of the gifts and goodies without cost from publicity-seeking businessmen. When the colossal display of vulgarity and effrontery flamed out long after midnight, Todd was long gone (to bed). Few had tasted the wretched champagne (the waiters had quickly begun hawking it at up to $7 a bottle), fewer had eaten the truck-borne smorgasbord, almost none of the guests left with gifts, although a passel of greedy looters and gate-crashers made off with enough lightweight plunder to stock a Sears, Roebuck store. And Todd, who never had 18,000 friends, had made almost that many black-tied enemies.