Milestones: Feb. 23, 1968

Born. To Hope Cooke, 27, Manhattan-born socialite who left the U.S. five years ago to become Queen of the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim, and King Palden Thondup Namgyal, 44: their second child, first daughter (the King has three children by his first wife, who died in 1957); in Calcutta.

Married. Regis Debray, 27, French-born Marxist, currently serving a 30-year sentence in a Bolivian prison (see THE WORLD).

Divorced. John Jacob Astor III, 56, portly playboy and great-great-grandson of the tycoon, by Dolores (“Dolly”) Pullman Astor, 39, his third wife, after 131 years of marriage (131 years of separation); on uncontested grounds of extreme cruelty; in Miami.

Died. Deendayal Upadhyaya, 50, newly elected leader of India’s rightist Jana Sangh Party (see THE WORLD).

Died. Elliott B. Macrae, 67, president since 1944 of E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publishers; of cancer; in New Canaan, Conn. Widely traveled and equally cosmopolitan in taste, Macrae over the years printed something for practically everyone; he sprang Mickey Spillane on the world (seven biggest sellers: 34.6 million copies), published Mountain Climber Maurice Herzog’s classic Annapurna, Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, and Evgeny Evtushenko’s Selected Poems. His great friend was A. A. Milne, whose whimsical Winnie-the-Pooh sold more than 1,000,000 copies and appeared in a dozen languages—including a pirated Russian translation (Vinni-Pukh i vse-vse-vse), which Macrae happily pirated right back last year and printed for publication in the U.S.

Died. Mae Marsh, 72, early Hollywood heroine, who first starred in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 classic, The Birth of a Nation; of a heart attack; in Hermosa Beach, Calif. Mae was only 16 when her auburn-haired beauty caught. Griffith’s eye and he signed her to a contract at $3 a day. She moved a generation of moviegoers as Flora, the star-crossed little sister, in Birth of a Nation, went on to become Griffith’s always tearful, often tragic leading lady in Intolerance, A Child of the Paris Streets and The White Rose. In the 1920s, she was one of Sam Goldwyn’s original Goldwyn Girls, earning $250,000 a year —but then came the talkies and the fading of her nova.

Died. Dr. Thomas Parran, 75, Surgeon General of the U.S. from 1936 to 1948, a founder of the World Health Organization, and leader of the long campaign against venereal disease; of pneumonia; in Pittsburgh. Few have done more to bring modern medicine to the nation’s poor than this gentlemanly physician; he fought typhoid and hookworm in South Carolina, smallpox in Colorado, tuberculosis in New York slums. In the struggle against venereal disease, he distributed educational pamphlets across the U.S., campaigned for widespread syphilis tests, and relentlessly tracked the sources of infection to such effect that the number of new syphilis cases dropped from 500,000 in 1936 to 314,300 in 1948, when he retired from government to help draw the charter for WHO, which now includes 128 nations.

Died. Howard Lindsay, 78, who with the late Russel Grouse formed one of Broadway’s best and certainly most durable play writing teams; of leukemia; in Manhattan. Impeccably dressed, starchy in temperament, Lindsay found the perfect friend and foil in the plump, jovial Grouse, and over 32 years, by what they called “a strange form of alchemy” (meaning infinite work), they turned out more than a dozen hit com edies and musical books. The most successful, of course, was Life With Father, in which, for most of its record 3,224 performances from 1939 to 1947, Lindsay himself played the blustery despot whose Victorian household rang with cries of “Damnation!” Many other plays on the list hardly suffer by comparison: Anything Goes (1934), Red, Hot and Blue (1936), State of the Union (1945), Call Me Madam (1950), The Sound of Music (1960) and Mr. President (1962). On his deathbed last week, Lindsay told his wife: “It’s been a wonderful journey. And I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.”

Died. Jaime Sabartés, 86, lifelong friend and secretary to Pablo Picasso; of a stroke; in Paris. For nearly 35 years, Sabartés served as protector, confidant and admirer of the artist—cutting off inquisitive visitors, answering all mail and humoring every whim. For that service, Picasso teased him mercilessly but immortalized him as well in a series of portraits, most notably painting his friend as a wistful, beer-drinking youth in 1901’s Le Bock.

Died. Ildebrando Pizzetti, 87, Italy’s leading contemporary composer of opera; of acute bronchial asthma; in Rome. So enthralled was Pizzetti with the “immense, irresistible tragedy” of Greek drama that he made it the theme of several of his 13 operas (Fedra, Clitennestra)—and in some critics’ view produced more dramatics than music, which ofttimes seemed ponderous and dull. Yet there was nothing but cheers in 1958 for his rhapsodic music in Assassininonella Cattedrale, based on T. S. Eliot’s saturnine verse play, Murder in the Cathedral.