People: Aug. 9, 1963

Out of the summer White House came the news: John F. Kennedy Jr.’s hair had been trimmed to lean and tidy normality, and was now parted on the left side, just like Dad’s.

At his death in 1911, Gustave Mahler’s Tenth Symphony was at best only seven-or eight-tenths finished; most scholars feared that the work was too personal and too fragmentary ever to be completed by another hand. But undaunted British Musicologist Deryck Cooke went ahead, fused and orchestrated the score. Without even listening to it, the composer’s widow Alma emotionally vetoed publication in 1960, but last week came word that she had finally heard the tape and changed her mind. The world premiere performance will be by the London Symphony Orchestra next August; Philadelphia’s Eugene Ormandy has asked to conduct the U.S. premiere at the opening of the 1964-65 concert season.

The announcement was terse, delivered through the family lawyer: “Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford II have decided on a legal separation. They have Entered into the usual form of separation.” Since both are Roman Catholics (he joined the church before their 1940 marriage), the separation will be a divorce in everything but name. Under the settlement, say friends, Mrs. Ford will live in New York with the three children (Charlotte, 22, Anne, 20, Edsel, 14); Henry will stay on in Grosse Pointe Farms.

Q. How could you tell the President’s press secretary was on the Hyannis Port Golf Club course? A. You could hear his drive bounce off the clubhouse.

Though he has been at the game on and off and off and off since he was 18, Pierre Salinger, 38, has never cottoned to drivers much. But occasionally he lucks one down the fairway and then it’s try, try again. Trying in a match with the President, he followed his clubhouse shot with a mulligan that zoomed 20 yards directly into the rough, to the acute embarrassment of the caddie, his son Mark, 14. Pierre, however, remained plucky, reported vaguely at match’s end that it ended in a tie.

“It’s a decision every actress must make,” said Actress Jean Seberg, 23. What is? Hollywood v. Broadway? Marriage v. career? The Method v. the classic approach? Nope, it’s whether or not to run around naked in front of the cameras. “I’m not criticizing anyone else who did it. But going nude just isn’t up my alley.” The whole problem was that stories were spreading that Jean had stripped to the waist for a love scene with Warren Beatty in the upcoming Lilith. In her Breathless in-bed scene with Jean-Paul Belmondo, in case anyone wondered, she wore “slacks and a top” under the covers. She was just as dressed for Warren. Besides, she said, “I’m worried about what my parents in Iowa will think.”

Old pals, from Hail Fellow Toots Shor to Toyman Louis Marx, went flying across the Pacific for the misty-eyed moment in Hawaii. There, at Hickam Field, U.S.A.F. Gen. Emmett (“Rosie”) O’Donnell Jr., 56, leader of the first B-29 raid on Tokyo in 1944, was mustered out after 35 years of service. In the White House Rose Garden, with parallel pomp, U.S.N. Admiral George Anderson Jr., 56, the Chief of Naval Operations who planned and ran the Cuba blockade and then was replaced by President Kennedy, got a gold star (in lieu of a second Distinguished Service Medal) from the President with “strong personal appreciation” for 36 years of service. His next duty tour: Ambassador to Portugal.

“Don’t dig that kind of croonin’, chum,” sloshed Frank Sinatra, 45, in High Society’s drunk scene. “You must be one of the newer fellas,” riposted Bing Crosby, 59. That was in 1956. Since then the newer fella has formed his own record company and that kind of croonin’ now sounds with the ring of new-minted coin. So in his first long-term record contract since Decca days seven years ago, Bing will do a five-year hitch on Frankie’s Reprise label. Beamed Sinatra after a recording session: “With Crosby, we’ve got it made.”

First came trial rockets—rumors that Air Force Lieut. Colonel John (“Shorty”) Powers, 40, voice of the astronauts, was no longer A-OK with his NASA bosses. For months Shorty bantily crowed at the notion. Two weeks ago, the crow got lower. “I am sure my role is going to change,” he admitted after a meeting with NASA Administrator James Webb. Last week it was official; Shorty was the cargo on a one-man, one-way man shoot out of Canaveral. Next on the pad: Paul Haney, 35, a NASA publicity man since shortly after the agency’s founding.

A bonus? Well, no, but Arkansas Farmer Winthrop Rockefeller, 51, thought he’d “like to have a little fun —just to see where the farm’s payroll goes.” So instead of checks or folding money, he personally doled out the regular payroll to 150 of his Winrock farm hands, in the form of 20,000 clinking silver dollars done up in individual pouches. The experiment pleased at least one farm hand. Said he as he hefted home his lode: “A Rockefeller’s silver is as good as gold.”