• U.S.

People: Jan. 13, 1961

5 minute read
TIME

Into Washington on President-elect John F. Kennedy’s Convair, the Caroline, winged Actor-Crooner Frank Sinatra and his close Hollywood pal, Cinemactor Peter Lawford, Jack Kennedy’s brother-in-law. Also included in the entourage: a dog in a black sweater. Frankie and Peter had an urgent mission: to stage a mammoth Inauguration Eve entertainment gala in the capital’s National Guard Armory. Frankie was fairly glutted with ideas, as he had hinted upon his arrival: “It’s really tremendous when you think Ella Fitzgerald is coming from Australia. I could talk to you for three hours and still not be able to give you all of our plans!” As the plans were laid, some several thousand fat cats were to be ensconced in the armory’s $100 seats and in 68 ringside boxes priced at $10,000 each. The biggest single act would doubtless be staged by Frankie himself: his Inaugural wardrobe had been designed by Hollywood Couturier Don Loper, who regularly makes up ladies’ ensembles. Soon after Loper leaked the news that Frankie had ordered “two of everything” just “in case he spills anything,” Frankie got so mad at the chic designer that he vowed he would not wear a stitch of Loper clothing.

A year after he was catapulted over nine officers senior to him and made commandant of the Marine Corps, General David M. Shoup delivered a peppery annual report in the form of a “happy, warless New Year” greeting to his Pentagon staff. Said Leatherneck Shoup: “A year ago I took the grips of the plow in my hands. After pushing an accumulation of vines and weeds from the moldboard, I lifted the lines from the dust and found hitched to that plow the finest team I ever held a rein on. Little geeing and hawing have been necessary.” But Shoup also gave the Corps a tilling in spots. Speaking of “pride,” he deplored the noncommissioned officer “whose uniform looks like it belonged to someone who retired in 1940; the officer with the yellow socks or the bay window. A few of these people are still around.”

Old and new briefly crossed paths in the U.S. Senate, then went their respective ways. At a reception for new members of Congress, Oregon Democrat Maurine Neuberger, taking the Senate seat held by her husband Richard until his death last March, got a brotherly buss from Democratic Elder Statesman Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Ambassador-designate to the U.N. Meanwhile, after 24 years in the Senate, Rhode Island’s durable Democrat Theodore Francis Greene — having walked, swum and cerebrated himself to the hearty age of 93 — left that august body (voluntarily, because he could surely have been re-elected had he chosen to run again last November), as the oldest man ever to serve in the Senate.

The most famous undergraduate of South Philadelphia High School is a current bobby-sox idol, Dreamboat Cacophonist Fabian (real name: Fabian Forte), 17, and last week it developed that he will remain an undergraduate for a while.

The principal of the school announced that — despite the help of private tutors in Hollywood and Philadelphia — Fabian is a 10-o’clock scholar in English and mathematics. Lacking his needed credits in those subjects, Fabian will not graduate with his old classmates next week. South Philadelphia High’s principal added that the current delay was caused by the “pressure” of a movie that the toneless lad was making.

To Decathlon Man Rafer Johnson (TIME cover, Aug. 29), whose gold medal in last summer’s Olympic Games was won as much on gumption as talent, went the A.A.U.’s James E. Sullivan Memorial Trophy as the outstanding U.S. amateur athlete of 1960. As the world’s top sports man — pro or amateur — SPORTS ILLUSTRATED tapped golf’s confident Arnold Palmer (TIME cover, May 2), who staged two cliffhanging rallies to win both the Masters and U.S. Open crowns, went on to win a record $80,738 for the year.

Tooling through Sydney on his way to race in the New Zealand Grand Prix, Britain’s balding Ace Driver Stirling Moss, 31, all but smothered himself in his own exhaust of self-crimination. “I’m a slob,” he announced. “My taste is gaudy. I’m useless for anything but racing cars. I’m ruddy lazy, and I’m getting on in years. It gets so frustrating, but then again I don’t know what I could do if I gave up racing.” Has Moss no Stirling virtues? “I appreciate beauty.” One of Nikita Khrushchev’s most enthusiastic eulogizers, the U.S.S.R.’s daily Izvestia, enterprisingly interviewed Red-prone Comedian Charlie Chaplin at his Swiss villa, where he has been in self-exile since 1952. Chaplin, 71, who met K. when the Soviet boss visited England in 1956, confided that he hopes to visit Russia some time this summer because “I have marveled at your grandiose experiment and I believe in your future.” Then Charlie spooned out some quick impressions of the Nikita he had glimpsed: “I was captivated by his humor, frankness and good nature and by his kind, strong and somewhat sly face.”

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