People, Nov. 3, 1958

With her “vignettes on life and love” now sprinkled over NBC’s weekend Monitor, Marlene Dietrich has become radio’s newest lovelornist. Meeting newsmen in Manhattan, she offered some samples of her new specialty, e.g., Marlene, who was married at 19, thinks today’s “teenagers should not marry because they don’t have enough experience.” She also explained that she has steadily rebuffed all approaches from TV because “overexposure in any way is bad.” Why does she keep going back to Las Vegas? “Money [$30,000 a week].” How does she manage to go on looking so young? “Well, I’m not too old [53], you know.”

In the six voting booths that demonstrated the U.S. secret ballot to visitors at the Brussels World’s Fair, some 200,000 popularity votes were cast by a poly-national assortment of voters who named their American favorites. Statesman: Abraham Lincoln. Actress: Kim Novak (who drew more than twice as many votes as second-running Marilyn Monroe). University: Harvard. Musician: Louis Armstrong. Most Important Immigrant to the U.S.: Albert Einstsin, distantly followed by Thomas Mann.

Neighborly Baptist John D. Rockefeller Jr. had a surprise for the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy of the Union, who run two schools and a junior college in Tarrytown, N.Y., near the Rockefellers’ Pocantico Hills estate. His gift: $1,600,000.

While campaigning for re-election in Minnesota’s Ninth District, U.S. Democrat-Farmer-Labor Congresswoman Coya Knutson, 45, got one voter’s unexpected pledge. “I’ll just have to vote for her,” said husband Andy Knutson, innkeeper and part-time plow dealer, who supported his wife’s rival in the primary, ineffectually pleaded with her last May to come down from Capitol Hill and home to Oklee, Minn.

In Los Angeles to read his poetry on Milton Berle’s television show, durable, leathery Carl Sandburg, 80, stuck to whisky sours at a Hollywood cocktail party in his honor. Back in his prairie years, he told adulating filmlanders, he “reviewed a thousand films in seven years for the Chicago Daily News.” Someone asked what he thought of the Beat Generation writers. Said Sandburg: “I don’t concern myself with ephemera.”

Last week an Eisenhower began his third* tour of duty at the White House. Moving on from an assignment at the Pentagon, Major John Eisenhower became assistant to Brigadier General Andrew J. Goodpaster, the President’s staff secretary.

Hoodlum Frank Costello came when he was called last week, began paying the four years and 1½ months he still owes on an income tax rap. Before catching his free bus to the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa., “The Prime Minister” told reporters he would be “put in solitary for 30 days, but I’m not really bitter.” Rolling across the Jersey Meadows, he might well have recalled a favorite axiom learned during his East Harlem youth: “Tough times make monkeys eat red peppers.”

Actress Myrna Loy, 53, once the Thin Man’s perfect wife, announced a separation and the coming end of her fourth marriage. Since 1951, she has been the wife of Howland H. Sargeant, 47, who was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs when she married him, now heads the Manhattan-based, anti-Communist American Committee for Liberation.

Off on a long, hardly conventional weekend from college, the Aga Khan, Harvard senior, flew to London, stopped at The Cygnet’s House finishing school to call for 17-year-old Sylvia Casablancas, daughter of a Mexican businessman. Driving on to Woburn Abbey, the Aga and his possible Begum quietly visited his aunt, the Duchess of Bedford.

One of Togetherness’ model homes seemed to be coming apart at the foundations. Pomades of publicity once hymned the Liberace family devotion, but last year Pianist Lee and Fiddler-Manager George split up. Last week, from the $100,000 mansion with the Knabe-shaped swimming pool, Mom joined in, said it was impossible for her to watch either son’s performances while they were estranged. “Lee lives in Palm Springs most of the time,” sniffed Frances Liberace, “surrounded by a gang of hillbillies and freeloaders. He is too trusting. He doesn’t know who his true friends are.”

No less winning but much less solemn than he was on his visit to the U.S. for medical treatment last year, Saudi Arabia’s five-year-old Prince Mashhur ibn Saud balanced a toy pistol on his head, was photographed at a Cairo party.

*The others: July 23-Aug. 15, 1954; June 3-Sept. 2, 1957.