People: Dec. 24, 1965

“Aren’t you tired of being called a sex kitten?” asked a feline voice above the press conference din in Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. Brigitte Bardot, 31, stuck out her chin and quite a bit of the rest of her, and allowed that she just “adored” the title. In the U.S. for the first time to heat up publicity for her new movie, Viva Maria, B.B. put on her sexy behavior and a bra for the occasion. “Will you ever marry again?” a questioner hollered, and Brigitte explained, “I think better without husbands.” When one catty correspondent asked the kitten: “Do you feel it necessary to become a mother to be really fulfilled?” Brigitte, whose son is 5, shot back: “I think one should try everything. Have you?” The next woman should have known better, but she snipped: “How does that fit in with your idea of love without marriage?” B.B. smiled: “Did you try it since yesterday?” Yes, said the reporter, “but what do I do now?” Well, advised La Bardot: “Keep trying. Keep trying.”

To Le Parisien Libéré, Rudolf Nureyev, 27, was “forever the prodigious dancer who left us breathless in 1961.” That was the year when the temperamental Tartar also left two Soviet “bodyguards” breathless at Le Bourget Airport as he leaped away from the Leningrad-Kirov Ballet troupe to become the most spectacular male dancer in the West. After performing in Paris with Dame Margot Fonteyn at the Third International Dance Festival, Rudi had a sentimental look at his old Leningrad-Kirov comrades for the first time in four years, broke into wild applause from the audience as Compatriot Yuri Soloviev bounded through Bluebird and Giselle. “They dance so beautifully,” sighed Rudi. But he carefully avoided dancing backstage for a reunion.

She was lovely when Greta Garbo resurrected her onscreen, prowling around in trousers with John Gilbert in 1933’s Queen Christina. Still, the myth persisted that besides being wanton and mannish, Sweden’s baroque queen was plain ugly. A catty tale. Archaeologists opened the marble tomb in the Vatican grotto where she was buried in 1689, discovered the silver death mask of a handsome woman who might have played the Garbo part herself.

Just as Virginia’s Senator Harry (“Little Harry”) Byrd Jr., 51, was settling comfortably into the handsome, five-room office suite that he’d inherited along with Papa Byrd’s title last month, in stalked Oregon’s Senator Wayne Morse, 65. The senior Senator prowled through the Virginian’s homestead, admired the view of the Capitol, and then announced that he would foreclose the mortgage. “I’d like to have the office,” rumbled Morse, who stands on the eighth rung from the top in Senate seniority and can claim nearly any office he chooses. Groaned one of Little Harry’s men: “As Number 100 in the Senate, Byrd will take the one that’s left—somewhere out in Maryland, maybe.”

“My goodness, Mr. McCone!” tutted a White House guard next day. “What’ll they do next—break into Edgar Hoover’s house?” It was nearly that bad. While former Central Intelligence Agency Director John McCone waltzed around with his wife Ti at Washington’s National Symphony Ball, somebody cracked the Shoreham Hotel’s defenses upstairs, broke into the McCones’ suite and seriously sabotaged Ti’s jewel collection. More than $18,000 in diamonds and pearls and other baubles were gone when the ball was over, and Edgar Hoover’s boys immediately jumped in to investigate, along with some CIA people. The CIA explained that it is merely doing “liaison” for its old boss.

Federal Communications Commissioner Robert E. Lee, 53, was sending out some signals complaining that the badinage on late-night television is “getting pretty close to indecency.” On Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, for instance, where Actor Ray Milland recently told that ever-so-funny story about having to go to the bathroom in a swimming pool while filming a scene. “I don’t want the industry to degenerate,” said Lee. He just wants the broadcasters to censor themselves a little for the public. In private, grinned the commissioner, “I’m one of the greatest off-color storytellers in town.”

For the honeymoon they trudged off on a bracing hiking and fishing trip through Washington State’s lonely Olympic Peninsula, the young bride decked out in her gifts from the groom: a back pack and hiking boots. After four months of marriage, the young bride panted: “I’m taking vitamin pills.” Now, two years later, Joan Martin Douglas, 25, can’t keep up any longer. Filing suit for divorce from U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, 67, Joan charged the old outdoorsman with “cruel treatment and personal indignities which have rendered plaintiff’s life burdensome.” The justice, facing his third divorce, offered no dissenting opinion.

The “fighter of the year,” voted the Boxing Writers’ Association. Of course. That’s just what Cassius Clay, 23, had been telling the Chicago cops that very afternoon. “I’m the champ!” snarled the Lip when a couple of plainclothesmen stopped the 1962 Cadillac in which he was being chauffeured around the South Side. The car didn’t have any license plates, and it was cruising slowly through a high-theft district—which attracted the cops’ attention. Cassius-Muhammed Ali thought it was a clear case of lèse majesté, pointing to his Black Muslim lapel pin and yelling: “You can’t arrest me! I represent another government—the Negro government. I’m a $15 million-a-year man, and you’re nothing but a policeman. Lay a hand on me and I’ll slap a brutality charge on you.” After a few more rounds of that, the poor fuzz hauled the fighter of the year off to the station house, where he posted $25 bond on a disorderly conduct charge.