People: Aug. 11, 1961

“I didn’t get along with my mother for a long time, but now we’re living in peace,” proclaimed precocious Cinemactress Tuesday Weld last September. “How long it will last, I don’t know.” About ten months, as it turned out, for by last week, Tuesday (who was born Susan on a Thursday less than 18 years ago) had flown her mother’s Hollywood Hills coop, settled into her own nine-room nest in Bel Air, complete with built-in hifi, patio and doll house.

∙∙∙

Before a breathless CBS-TV audience, Hearst Newspapers National Editor Frank Conniff and his editor in chief totted up the expense-account tariff for their “Task Force” crusades in Europe (TIME, June 30). On the three-man, three-week, 1955 Moscow junket alone, estimated Visiting Firebrand William Randolph Hearst Jr., the tab averaged $1,000 a day. “On the other hand,” prompted Fellow Journeyman Conniff, “the caviar was good, and they had a certain liquid there that didn’t hurt either.”

∙∙∙

Running silent temporarily was Vice Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, 61, who after forgoing most of his leaves for the past decade, wound up in Bethesda, Md., Naval Hospital with a mild heart attack. Said the Navy, which in February extended Rickover’s service two years beyond the normal retirement age: “He is sitting up, and his condition is considered excellent.”

∙∙∙

Though his longtime friend and Man Friday Allan Searle reported him “not at all well,” Somerset Maugham, 87, was, when up to it, honing the razor’s edge of his autobiography. Maugham, who has written more “absolutely last” works than many another author has produced in a lifetime, had originally earmarked the autobiography for posthumous publication, but found himself bloodying so many colleagues that he has gamely decided to hustle it out as soon as possible. “If the autobiography is published after his death,” explained Searle, “they might well pull him out of his grave.”

∙∙∙

Saying Mass at a side altar of Hyannis’ St. Francis Xavier Church, the Rev. John F. Keough, a visiting priest from Ireland’s County Cork, found himself without an altar boy. Leaving his wife and seven children in their pew, an overage volunteer quickly moved in to fill the gap. Not until the congregation had departed did Father Keough learn that his self-appointed assistant had been U.S. Attorney General (and ex-acolyte) Robert F. Kennedy, 35

∙∙∙

Long one of TV’s remotest stars, Pixie Pundit David Brinkley confessed that he had finally become reconciled to autograph hounds. “Except,” he backslid, “when I’m out somewhere with my children. I don’t want them to get the idea their father is some kind of tinhorn celebrity—at least not until they’re old enough to realize that this is an ephemeral, transitory, shallow and not very important kind of fame that can and will disappear even faster than it arrived.”

∙∙∙

From a guest pulpit in the New York Herald Tribune, Author William Saroyan, a longtime tax-impelled expatriate, unburdened himself of a sermon on the sins of the U.S. theater. Among his targets: “fishy” audiences (“The real people almost never get to the theater”), captious critics (“If they were reviewing the world, the show would close after two performances”), and that revered Broadway training ground, the Actors’ Studio (“The supreme achievement at this new church is to divorce from any of its members even the faintest condition of peopleness”). The gist of Saroyan’s complaint: “Everybody is kind of real sick and proud of it, and awfully impatient about those who are well.”

∙∙∙

After a summer devoted to the dolce vita, volcanic Soprano Maria Callas, 37, prepared to erupt for the first time before the cameras. Reportedly bankrolled by her great and good friend, Maritime Moneybags Aristotle Onassis, Maria is planning to make a film version of one of her most successful operatic roles, Cherubini’s Medea. Setting: Milan’s La Scala, not far from the courtroom where Maria’s estranged husband, Industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini, avowedly plans to enliven an upcoming legal separation trial with an angry aria on La Callas’ “wanton search of happiness that she should realize she will never regain.”

∙∙∙

In a memento-strewn Manhattan apartment, Claire Ruth, widow of baseball’s Sultan of Swat, pondered the growing possibility that the Babe’s 1927 record of 60 homers in a single season may be beaten this year by Yankee Sluggers Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. Said she: “I know they say records are made to be broken, but deep down in my heart I hope it doesn’t happen.” Even if Mantle or Maris should succeed, however, Mrs. Ruth saw consolations: “At least it will be a Yankee who did it. And everyone will remember Babe as the first. Many have flown the Atlantic, but it’s Lindbergh they talk about.”

∙∙∙

After manfully weathering a chichi London wedding as a satin-suited, ostrich-plumed Lord Fauntleroyish page, the Earl of Sunderland, 5, grandson of the Duke of Marlborough and distant cousin to Sir Winston Churchill, foundered at the subsequent Savoy Hotel reception. His stiff upper lip curling, out came a petulant tongue, and with it, a noise less associated with Belgravia than The Bronx.

∙∙∙

With the insouciance that only a pastured politician can achieve, Japan’s ex-Premier Shigeru Yoshida, 82, was busy knocking heads of state he had known. Winston Churchill, said Japan’s most powerful post-Occupation leader in a newspaper interview, was “the strong type who would do anything for his own cause.” Of Charles de Gaulle, Yoshida had the “impression that there is nothing in his head except Algeria.” Other Yoshida character sketches: Konrad Adenauer (“a good friend, so I can’t say anything bad about him”), John F. Kennedy (“I met his father quite often when I was in Britain. I don’t know the son, but he seems to be doing quite well, although he is young”), Dwight D. Eisenhower (“He is not an ordinary military man. He has great common sense. When I met him in 1954, he said that since he was a soldier, I should discuss difficult things with John Foster Dulles”). As for Dulles himself, Yoshida insisted that the late Secretary of State was not inflexible, just “a man of strong principles. When the Korean war broke out, he came to Japan and told us to rearm. He was very unhappy when I told him, ‘Don’t talk nonsense.’ ”

∙∙∙

In Paris to direct the Jackie Gleason film Gigot (TIME, May 5), Dancer Gene Kelly, 48, was exposed to a new plastic art: the explosive expressionism of France’s right-wing terrorists who, in an effort to bomb a police station, splintered Kelly’s parked Citroen sedan. With somewhat surer aim, the terrorists also hurled a threat at Enrico Mattel, 55, ambitious boss of Italy’s state petroleum monopoly, who is reportedly dickering for the right to exploit the Sahara’s oil once France has been evicted from Algeria. In a note that prompted police in Rome to put a 24-hour-a-day guard on Mattei, the anti-Gaullist underground informed the Italian oilman that it took “pleasure in informing you of a decision made at a secret meeting in Paris. Considered as hostages and condemned to death: Enrico Mattei and all members of his family. One of our agents is leaving for Rome with the mission of executing this decision if you do not cease your subversive activities.”

∙∙∙

During a preliminary pep talk to 34 as. sorted song-and-dance types in his newly rehearsing musical. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Director-Writer Abe Burrows introduced the show’s costar, Crooner Rudy Vallee, 60, a slightly crumpled carbon of the Vagabond Lover last seen on Broadway in George White’s Scandals of 1935. Following a quick “heigh-ho” all around, Burrows democratically told the troupe, “The difference between principals and ensemble is that principals can’t sing.”