People, Jul. 25, 1960

Boston’s sprightly Richard Cardinal Gushing recalled that “months ago” he had predicted that Jack Kennedy would be the Democratic presidential nominee. After that, he made no more political auguries. But in Milwaukee last week he foresaw, fairly safely, Richard Nixon’s nomination by the G.O.P. next week. His view of the contenders: “Both good campaigners and very capable.” As His Eminence sees it, religion will not be a legitimate issue in the campaign. “The people are in a mood to hear the issues discussed rather than personalities and some other nonsense.”

Australian-born Actress Judith Anderson, 62, long abask in U.S. footlights, nervously made an entrance in the ballroom of London’s Buckingham Palace. Quivering with stage fright, she was invested by Queen Elizabeth II with the insignia of a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Tremoloed Dame Judith in her best Medea style: “The hardest role I’ve ever had to play.”

There was much of the past that ex-Cinemactress Gene Tierney, 39, wanted to forget. Behind her were 31 movies, a divorce from sleek Couturier Oleg Cassini, a retarded daughter (Gene had German measles during the pregnancy) and five years, off and on, as a voluntary patient in private mental hospitals. Last week she decided that she was strong enough to make a clean break with those bad bygone years. In Aspen, Colo.’s Community Church, she married Houston Oilman W. (for William) Howard Lee, 51, freshly divorced from his second wife, ex-Cinemactress Hedy Lamarr. Lee had courted Gene while she clerked in a dress shop in Topeka as an outpatient in Kansas’ renowned Menninger Clinic, and had convinced her that he is a thoroughly reformed playboy. Said the bride: “Everything looks so beautiful today!” In London’s Haymarket Theater, shortly before the curtain rose on Terence Rattigan’s hit play Ross, a couple strolled down the aisle to Row G, soon complained to an usherette that another couple had usurped their No. 1 and 2 seats. The unwitting usurpers: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, enjoying an incognito evening out. Apologetically and still unrecognized by the audience, the royal pair moved over. Earlier, Philip was better prepared for a surprise that arose at Reading University, whose vice chancellor. Sir John Wolfenden, awarding him an honorary doctor of science degree, glowingly described the prince in the words of Poet John Dryden: A man so -various, that he seem’d to be Not one, but all Mankind’s Epitome.

Having peeked at an advance copy of Sir John’s little speech. Philip mischievously rejoined: “I hope that what the vice chancellor has left unsaid is not an indication of his true feelings!”*

In the long twilight of the lives, mostly spent commuting with fair weather between England and the French Riviera, Sir Winston and Lady Churchill journeyed to Venice, briefly explored its familiar old canals by motorboat before going aboard a somewhat larger craft, the rakish, 325-ft. yacht of Shipping Lord Aristotle Socrates Onassis. Bound for a leisurely Mediterranean cruise, the yacht sailed down the Adriatic Sea. dropped anchor near a retreat of Yugoslavia’s President Tito. Going ashore, Sir Winston rekindled his spirits by reliving some World War II battles with his erstwhile partisan ally.

In her smallest misunderstood-waif voice, Cinemactress Marilyn Monroe acknowledged the rumors and allowed: “Most of my leading men have said un pleasant things about me after we had finished working together. Yves Montand is the exception. Now am I supposed to marry him?” Marilyn, whose legal leading man is Playwright Arthur Miller, and Montand, husband of Oscar-winning Cinemactress Simone (Room at the Top) Signoret, co-starred recently in a Hollywood romp whose title was likely to inspire a little gossip — Let’s Make Love.

But as far as Montand could remember, he and Marilyn had never even exchanged, say, a passionate handshake offscreen. Flying in from Paris, he gallantly cried: “Whoa! People go too fast in this country. I’m very flattered, but I can’t understand why people talk.” Roughly a year after Dr. Bernard Finch shot and killed his wife on their Southern California estate, a second first-degree murder trial was on the Los Angeles court docket. Finch, 43, once wealthy, now near-broke and wan after a year in jail, and his ex-mistress, Carole Tregoff, 23, will again contend that the shooting was an accidental consequence of their love for each other. After their first trial, which lasted for three months and ended with a hung jury, Carole was sprung on $25,000 bail. She now seems cheery and confident, a mood perhaps induced by the knowledge that most of the jurors in the earlier trial favored freedom for her. They also favored conviction for Finch.

When Artist Thomas Hart Benton painted the mural in the capitol of home state Missouri 24 years ago, he drew many other things — such as brickbats, catcalls and roars of rage from those who saw in his work “a disgrace to the state.” Instead of the usual historical sugar icing, Benton blandly depicted traders giving firewater to the Indians, a slave market, scrawny cattle and a sorry lot of rustic bumpkins. “The time will come,” said one critic, “when Missouri will find the mural so odious that its executives will order it to be blacked out.” In time, the mural was almost blacked out by soot and grime, but last week, in the now air-conditioned capitol, a team of restoration specialists was busily bringing its unpleasantries of yesteryear back to light. Chuckled Artist Benton, 71: “I knew they’d gotten used to it.” And he added almost sadly: “Prac tically everything I do is accepted now.”

Reminiscing in Australia, Grand Old Trouper Billie Burke, a bubbly 72, told newsmen a few tidbits about Impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, whose second and last wife she was. “Men didn’t like Mr. Ziegfeld,” she said. “They were jealous of his success with the ladies. But he wasn’t as bad as they said. He just thought it good

TROUPER BURKE (CIRCA 1913) Not until they were married.

publicity for everyone to think he was in love with all the girls.” Flo got very upset about their publicity after they were married in a sudden dash to New Jersey following a Broadway matinee: “Mr. Ziegfeld was furious when he saw that the hanging of four men had pushed our wedding off the front pages.” Why had Billie never joined her husband’s girlie galas? “My legs were too fat. But he didn’t discover that until we were married.” France’s favorite spinner of adult bedtime stories, Novelist Francoise Sagon, 24 and recently divorced, looked at life and love in rather young-fogy fashion for an interviewer from the quarterly Transatlantic Review. Sighed she wearily: “At 19, if you like, I could have been completely changed by someone or I could have discovered something through someone. Now I don’t think I could any more.

I could change my way of life, be happy or unhappy, but I can no longer change a set of reflexes which is me.”

*The Dryden quotation from Absalom and Achitophel goes on: Stiff in Opinions, always in the wrong; Was Everything by starts, and Nothing long; But, in the course oj one revolving Moon, Was Chymist, Fidler, Statesman, and Buffoon.