Milestones: Dec. 25, 1964

Born. To Archduke Otto von Habsburg, 52, scholarly pretender to the Austrian throne until 1961, when he renounced his claim; and Princess Regina of Saxe-Meiningen, 39: their seventh child, second son; in Munich.

Married. Abbe Lane, 32, Xavier Cugat’s red-hot mambo for 14 years, until she divorced him last spring; and Perry Leff, 38, Hollywood talent agent; both for the second time; in Manhattan.

Married. Charles Evans Hughes III, 49, Manhattan architect, grandson of the Chief Justice, and Kimberly Jean Wiss, 40, freelance sportswriter, record holder for the largest fish ever landed by a woman (a 1,525-lb. black marlin); both for the second time; in Manhattan.

Divorced. By Les Paul, 48, electric guitarist who turned such oldtimers as How High the Moon into ear-popping pop hits: Mary Ford, 43, his sing-along partner; on grounds of cruelty; after 15 years of marriage, one child, now in Paul’s custody; in Hackensack, N.J.

Died. William Bendix, 58, comic and character actor, whose fireplug face and concrete-mixer voice stole the show in more than 50 Hollywood productions (The Hairy Ape, The Babe Ruth Story) and on TV’s The Life of Riley, a series about a dopey factory riveter that so tickled the viewers it ran for eight years, bringing Bendix some $3,000,000 in salary—which, as he put it, “isn’t bad for a guy who was on relief in 1934”; of pneumonia; in Los Angeles.

Died. Phil Davis, 58, cartoonist-creator of Mandrake the Magician, the silk-hatted, opera-cloaked hero who hypnotized villains into paroxysms of fear and turned their bullets to putty with a snap of his fingers in 253 newspapers for 30 years; of a heart attack; in Manhattan.

Died. Richard Joshua Reynolds, 58, playboy heir to a king-size slice of his father’s tobacco empire (Camel, Winston, Salem), who scorned the family trade to become a taxi driver, deck hand, aviator, ship owner, horse breeder and sometime Democratic politician, managing meanwhile to run through $10 million of his $25 million inheritance settling three marriages; of chronic pulmonary emphysema; in Lucerne, Switzerland, 36 hours before his fourth wife gave birth to a daughter.

Died. Alberto Byington Jr., 60, Brazilian tycoon who pyramided his father’s multimillion-dollar holdings by establishing Brazil’s first movie, record and air-conditioning companies, added a network of 22 radio stations, 250 cold storage plants, and a major bauxite development—all on top of a vast coffee empire; of hepatitis; in Rio de Janeiro.

Died. William Montgomery McGovern, 67, political science professor at Northwestern University, who was the first Westerner to enter Tibet’s forbidden city of Lhasa, befriended Chinese Revolutionary Sun Yat-sen and served as a top World War II intelligence adviser, experiences that made his “McGoo” lectures the featured attraction on Northwestern’s campus for 30 years; after a long illness; in Evanston, Ill.

Died. Carl Joachim Hambro, 79, longtime leader of Norway’s Conservative Party (1926-34, 1945-54), and last president of the powerless League of Nations (1939-46), who in 1944 horrified the League by suggesting that small nations should not be accorded equal vote with great powers in international organizations; after a long illness; in Oslo.

Died. Vladimir Yourkevitch, 79, designer of France’s famed Normandie, chief competitor of Britain’s Queens for transatlantic honors in the 1930s, who in 1942 stood on a Manhattan pier as the ship burned and finally capsized, crying in vain to police holding him back that he alone had the knowledge to save the vessel; of cancer; in Yonkers, N.Y.

Died. Victor Hess, 81, Austrian-born physicist who, after taking radiation measurements during ten balloon ascensions over Europe in the early 1900s, descended to announce that radiation in the atmosphere resulted from “cosmic rays,” not from radioactivity in the earth as had previously been supposed, a theory that was eventually accepted and won him the 1936 Nobel Prize; in Mount Vernon, N.Y.

Died. Lord Woolton, 81, Churchill’s food minister from 1940 to 1943, known to his friends as “the greatest quartermaster since Moses” and to the rest of Britain as the man who introduced ration points and the meatless “Woolton Pie” (potatoes, vegetables, oatmeal and gravy), who became Tory Party chairman in 1946 and helped engineer the party’s return to power by easing out oldtimers and rebuilding the treasury; of a heart attack; in Sussex, England.

Died. Alexander Meiklejohn, 92, pioneer of progressive education whose views were honored last year with the award of a Presidential Freedom Medal after early decades of rejection, notably in 1923, when he was forced to resign as Amherst College president for scorning standard disciplines in favor of social science and philosophy, and again in 1934, when his Experimental College at Wisconsin University (no grades or exams) was deemed infeasible and disbanded after seven years; of pneumonia; in Berkeley, Calif.