People: Mar. 31, 1961

While her husband breasted the politi cal winds in Washington, Jacqueline Ken nedy, 31, deplaned hatless and coatless despite near-freezing cold at New York’s La Guardia Airport, spent three gay days on the town. Usually accompanied by her sister, Princess Radziwill, wife of a Polish peer turned London businessman, Jackie looked more elegant each time she came through the revolving doors of the Carlyle Hotel. She supped with Art Dealer Harry Brooks, Fashion Editor Diana Vreeland and such socialite old friends as Mrs. Charles Wrightsman. Her big evening was spent catching the popularly-priced ($3.95 top) City Center ballet with U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson as her es cort. After the performance, Jackie went backstage to thank the company, heard one member exult: “She has made our season.” Days were devoted to fashion fittings in her suite, with the dresses dis patched through the lobby under canvas by her couturier, Oleg Cassini. Also under wraps: a massive Mr. John hatbox that surely contained Jackie’s Easter bonnet. At odd moments during the week, she inspected the art galleries and curio shops that abound about her Madison Avenue hotel, but her only known purchase was an antique French cachepot.

As a special consultant for a national youth-fitness program, President Kennedy tapped the University of Oklahoma’s Bud Wilkinson, 44. While filling the unpaid advisory post, Wilkinson will continue as athletic director and football coach at Oklahoma, where in an unsuccessful 1960 season, his 14-year monopoly on the Big Eight title was finally busted. When asked about the 1961 prospects of his Sooner eleven, the new special consultant, as trim as in his days as a Minnesota quarterback, assured the press: “We will be physically fit but technically incapable.”

Old ghosts walked in Rome, as 200 admirers gathered to hear British Blackshirt Sir Oswald Mosley, 64, plump for a fascist Europe and African apartheid. In the dreamworld process of carving out a united and expanded Europe independent of cold war blocs, Mosley announced that “South Africa, part of Rhodesia, the Sahara and Algeria would belong to us. Blacks, if they like, could remain in the white zone—but without voting or civil rights. I think they would make out well just the same.” On hand to introduce Sir Oswald at the neo-fascist rally was Expatriate Poet Ezra Pound, 75, who interrupted his own dreamworld sojourn in Rapallo to revisit the scene of his wartime, anti-U.S. radio broadsides.

Violating Parkinson’s Law. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson notified the U.S. Secret Service that in Washington he was not to be fenced in or followed by its agents, two of whom had shadowed his predecessor.

Old sailors never die; they just wade away. While patrolling the Mediterranean, the U.S. Sixth Fleet hosted a junketing group of West German dignitaries, plus two retired U.S. flag officers. Admiral Jesse Oldendorf, 74, a hero of the historic Battle for Leyte Gulf, and Vice Admiral Calvin Durgin, 68, also a battle-tried World War II task-group skipper. When the time came for the guests to shift from the supercarrier Forrestal to the missile cruiser Springfield, a high line was rigged, and the vessels slowed to 15 knots. “Which seat will you take?” asked Durgin, as their turn came on the double bosun’s chair. “The front,” replied Oldendorf, and off they went, back to back. Halfway across, a pelican hook popped, and Durgin nosedived into the drink, while Oldendorf plopped in “backside first you might say.” Hauled aboard the car rier, the sopping brass was restored with a hooker of medicinal brandy.

When Harvard Faculty Dean McGeorge Bundy, 42, left the Cambridge administration for Kennedy’s, he brought his academic objectivity along with him. Complimented on the vigor of the new leadership in Washington, White House Aide Bundy demurred, noted that little Kennedy legislation has passed through Congress. Said he : “At this point, we are like the Harlem Globetrotters, passing forward, behind, sidewise and underneath. But nobody has made a basket yet.”

While playing with the Birmingham Repertory Company in the 1920s, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, now 68, gave Britain some of its finest theatrical hours, earned the especial esteem of the creator of many of his most challenging roles. Recalls Hardwicke in his memoirs, A Victorian in Orbit: “Probably the handsomest compliment ever paid me was delivered by Bernard Shaw. ‘You are,’ he said, ‘my fifth favorite actor, the first four being the Marx Brothers.’ ” Knighted in 1934, Hardwicke well remembers the occasion. King George V could not quite catch the actor’s name, finally gave up and, “lifting his jeweled sword, dubbed me knight. ‘Sir Samuel Pickwick,’ he proclaimed.”