People: Dec. 25, 1964

Aber natürlich! When Christian Democrats from the city of Bonn convene next month to select their candidate for the 1965 West German Parliamentary elections, they are expected to nominate the freshest whiff of springtime that ever wafted up the Rhine from Cologne: Konrad Adenauer, 89. Der Alte has been telling cronies that his idea of a hobby for those sunset years would be a back bench of the Bundestag for the term that ends in 1969.

On his feet for Christmas, swore the junior Senator from Massachusetts. And out of New England Baptist Hospital he stiffly strode with his wife Joan. In a bracing (20°) Boston breeze, Teddy Kennedy, 32, cracked brittle jokes (“I just happen to have with me a speech that I didn’t get to make at the Democratic convention in West Springfield last June”), then carefully eased into a convertible for a rootin’-tootin’ motorcade to the airport. A commercial jet took him to Miami, and the family Caroline on the last leg of his odyssey to his two children in Palm Beach. But all that wasn’t quite enough for Teddy Jr., 3, who greeted his father with “Carry me piggyback, Daddy?” “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a while for that,” said Daddy with what newsmen gamely reported was a smile.

Nervous about his debut on the Home Service? “Is it likely?” sniffed Winston Churchill, 24. “That hardly runs in the family,” considering that his famous grandfather gave the BBC some of its finest hours in World War II. Leaving as little as possible to Mendelian chance, young Churchill started off his daily lunchtime news-and-interviews half hour by asking his first guest, Veteran Pundit Alistair Cooke, “What tips can you give me?” “If you try to be somebody else,” cautioned Cooke, “you’re lost.” So the fledgling commentator skipped politics next day, and interviewed Humorist Malcolm Muggeridge on the role of sex in American salesmanship.

“It has been a sea of great moments for us all,” said the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 35, relaxing after a Harlem rally for 8,000 before flying down to say hello to Lyndon Johnson. Perhaps he was recalling his ride along Manhattan’s East River drive when harbor fireboats turned on their hoses in an aquatic tribute. But the most emotional moment of the returning Nobel prizewinner’s welcome by New York came during his reception at city hall, where King, his wife Coretta and his parents were given a standing ovation by Mayor Robert Wagner, photographers and civil rights leaders. Said Wagner, presenting a Medallion of Honor: “This city has welcomed many world-renowned figures, but I can think of none who has won a more lasting place in the moral epic of America.”

With a certain smile, Graduate Girl Novelist Françoise Sagan, 29, reported in McCall’s (which invented togetherness) that the latest thing for a two-time loser in the Paris set, like Françoise herself, is to wear both her outdated wedding rings together. That way, a man can tell she is a “dangerous person to become serious about,” while if he persists in chasing a three-or four-ring femme fatale, he is really saying bonjour, tristesse.

As a boy in Minneapolis, Jean Paul Getty wanted a pony and a mastiff dog for his birthday. He didn’t get them, but he still likes “simple, childish things.” So when friends gathered at Sutton Place, his 72-room shack outside London, to help him celebrate his 72nd birthday, they gave the thrifty billionaire a pencil sharpener, eraser, appointments book, “and one of those brushes, with a long handle, which enable you to brush the back of your jacket properly.” The biggest hit of the day were three portraits of himself, taken by Ottawa’s Yousuf Karsh, that he had ordered months ago. “I’m hard to photograph, but he made me look almost human,” blushed Getty.

Though the Secret Service men camped in the basement rumpus room find it cramped, Muriel Humphrey, 52, doesn’t want to move from her eight-room, home in Chevy Chase, Md., to one of the mansions that Lyndon Johnson thinks more fitting for a Vice President’s family. “There are things around this house that would make it hard to leave,” she explained in her first press conference since the election, proudly pointing out the handprints of her four children (now grown) that are embedded in the cement by the patio.

Anxious officials issued instructions to Bangkok residents to get out in the streets and wave when Japan’s Crown Prince Akihito, 30, came for a state visit. But no such advice was needed, since Akihito’s Princess Michiko, 30, almost matched King Bhumibol’s lovely Queen Sirikit, 32, in a Thai tie for looks. “A meeting of the chrysanthemum and the jasmine,” murmured one Oriental queen-watcher as the two consorts paraded past, and a baby elephant presented to Michiko found her so tasty that he nibbled not only the sugar cane she gave him but her wrist as well. Prince Akihito, meanwhile, being an amateur marine biologist, sneaked off to the fish market for specimens.

Sherlock Holmes puffed at his meerschaum. “Extraordinary, my dear Watson,” he mused. “When Arthur Conan Doyle took down The Adventures of the Greek Interpreter from your notes in 1893, he thought his tales about us merely a device to raise funds so he could devote himself to serious literature. We may surmise that he tucked the published manuscript in a child’s notebook while visiting friends, and, being notoriously absentminded, never missed it. Yet strange indeed are the ways of taste. His serious novels are all but forgotten, while Sir Arthur’s surviving son, Adrian Conan Doyle, is wealthy enough by virtue of the royalties my cases still engender in 40 languages (and on that remarkable invention, television) to pay $12,600 at a London auction to buy the Greek manuscript from—dear me!—an American.”