People: Oct. 1, 1965

Papa Beatle Ringo Starr, 25, cocked an ear to little Zak’s first wails and mused: “It could be a promising noise. Could be.” At any rate, the Baby Beatle’s hair was coming in nicely, and he’d inherited the magnificent Ringo nose along with the basset-hound jowls. Now, if he can learn to ululate on key—could be. “He’s a little smasher,” whooped Ringo as he called at London’s Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital and packed off Mama Maureen and child in a Rolls-Royce to their apartment in Marylebone.

Strange are the powers of the inscrutable Occident and its music. Whenever Japan’s scholarly Prince Mikasa, 49, youngest brother of Emperor Hirohito, hears the screechings of a U.S. hillbilly tune, he sheds his coat and happily stomps around like a Tennessee mountaineer. The prince did it twice on a private tour of the U.S.—once at the New York World’s Fair, where he do-si-doed into a square-dance demonstration, again in Philadelphia when he overheard the Delaware Valley Square Dance Association holding a hoedown in the ballroom of his hotel. But at the mention of the frug or Watusi, the prince winces a bit: “I do not do these dances, and it is not for me to say too hastily whether they are good.”

Let us be “Roman, Epicurean, supercilious,” sighs the publisher’s preface. “The Jet Set is passé. Today you have the Restless Set, those people who are bored with the banal.” So saying, Editor-Publisher Igor Cassini, 50, bored and restless ever since 1964 when he was fined $10,000 as an unregistered agent for Dominican Dictator Rafael Trujillo, launched his new magazine Status. It had pieces by Lucius Beebe and Cleveland Amory, who go all the way back to Café Society, and some instructions on giving yourself the “Go-Go-ciety look” (“float about carefree in tiny doll dresses”) or the “soignée Society presence” (“three sets of fake lashes, two above, one below”).

Appointed writer-in-residence at Radcliffe College, Miss Pamela L. Travers specified only that she would like a rocking chair and a westward-looking window (“You see,” she explained, “my thoughts have always looked westward”), and then allowed that back in 1934 she hadn’t really “written” Mary Poppins at all. “I don’t think you can just sit down and think up a Mary Poppins,” said she. “I prefer to believe that she brushed by like a bird, and I put salt on her tail.”

Toting a textbook called The Chief Executive for her course on “the American President,” Lynda Bird Johnson reported that it was “awfully good” to be back at the University of Texas for her senior year after two worrisome, unprivate semesters at George Washington University just down the street from the White House. But Sister Luci Johnson, 18, still commuting to school from her folks’ place on Pennsylvania Avenue, found the whole thing a little scary as she put on her freshman beanie to begin studies at Georgetown University’s School of Nursing. Luci relaxed a little when the hazing student nurses in the junior class made her do 25 push-ups for giggling and gave her a freshman nickname: Howard Johnson.

Noblesse oblige: over the years, Prince Antony Radziwill stuck to his obligations, first as a waiter at the Blue Cockatoo in Chelsea and then as wine steward at the Hertford Hotel in London’s Bayswater. Finally the noblesse paid off. To celebrate his promotion to “joint head barman” at the hotel, “Mr. Tony,” whose cousin, Prince Stanislas Radziwill, is the husband of Jackie Kennedy’s sister, Lee, stirred up a dry martini. Said he: “I pride myself on knowing how to make them.”

With “nothing much to do,” the four Manhattan girls (average age: 24) organized a rock ‘n’ roll combo called the What Four, designed wide-wale corduroy jump suits for themselves to wail in, tailored a couple of rock tunes to order, and then, reading success in a lot of tea leaves, invited a movie photographer to film a documentary of their “inevitable” jumping to fame. The What Four: Lillian Pogan on lead guitar, Elizabeth Burke on drums, China Girard on rhythm guitar, and on bass guitar, Diane Hartford, wife of A. & P. Heir Huntington Hartford, who invited the group down to the family’s New Jersey estate, Melody Farm, to rehearse for their Soft Day’s Night.

Accepting an honorary doctor of laws degree at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, N.J., Civil Rights Parson Martin Luther King Jr., 36, smiled ecumenically: “Things really must be improving when a Catholic college gives a degree to someone named Martin Luther.”

They were lovely hangers for any dress. Baroness Fiona Thyssen slinked down the runway in harlequin pants by Galitzine. Princess Luciano Pignatelli drifted by in Valentino’s feather-and-sequin coat. Princess Ira von Furstenberg pranced on in a Mondrian dress by St. Laurent. And princely P.R. Man Serge Obolensky, who had rounded up his titled friends to stage the haute couture parade, beamed as 2,600 ladies and their husbands paid $10 apiece to jam into Alexander’s department store in Manhattan to see what fancy duds a bargain outfit could include on its racks —and incidentally stage a benefit for the American Cancer Society.