People: Mar. 3, 1961

Puerto Rican-born Yvette Diago, 29, the $3,074-a-year congressional secretary who in December married her boss—Harlem Minister Plenipotentiary and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, 52—stayed on the job, and on the House, but found her pay quadrupled, to $12,974.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs G. Mennen Williams put his best foot forward, and it ended up in his mouth. In Kenya on a four-week African tour, the former Michigan Governor took up the cry “Africa for the Africans,” and when told this was the slogan of black African militants, he lamely replied that he means by Africans all who live in Africa, whether black or white (which is not the way people on the scene use it). Then in Uganda on his next stop, he told the press that the U.S. seeks a strong, independent Africa lest “another kind of tyranny” enter. And what did he mean by tyranny? “Well,” he replied, “worse than they ever suffered before . . . but I withdraw that phrase. I did not mean the British administration is tyranny.” It was a stutter heard around the world. Back in London, while “Soapy” toured Tanganyika, two Tory backbenchers urged an end to the itinerant phrasemaker’s “interference in Her Majesty’s government’s colonial and Commonwealth affairs.”

The match between Oscar-winning Cinemactor Ernest (Marty) Borgnine, 44, and Mexican Cinemactress Katy (High Noon) Jurado, 33, seemed to have been made in Madison Square Garden. The burly, terrible-tempered ex-sailor and his molten second mate (who says: “Love is much better after a fight”) squabbled on Christmas Eve, held the second round a week later on their first anniversary, exchanged divorce suits in January. Last week in Rome, following their umpteenth reconciliation, the Borgnines were at it again. After an ear-pounding, table-banging restaurant row. Katy either slipped, was pushed or fell — but she was seen sprawled out on the Via Veneto. It was later explained that they have reconciled.

While French Ambassador-designate Lieut. General James M. Gavin hopefully awaited a tenfold increase in his representation allowance to enable him to entertain in style, Stanton Griffis, 73, a wealthy former businessman-turned-ambassador (successively to Poland, Egypt, Argentina and Spain), said that in five years of ambassadoring, 1947 to 1952, he only was out of pocket $25,000. “An ambassador.” said Griffis, “can live on his salary and allowances just as any American businessman living abroad. If he entertains every visiting U.S. delegation, including the ladies’ group from Keokuk because the mayor wrote a letter, he’ll be a kind of maître d’hôtel and Perle Mesta rolled into one. The question is: Are ambassadors supposed to represent their nations or run boardinghouses?”

“I hope that we have not yet gotten to the point in this country where we have an elite of high IQs,” insisted New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller while plumping for his new education bill that would help all students, not just brains. “I happen not to have such a high IQ,” confessed Rocky, who nonetheless was Phi Beta Kappa at Dartmouth. “But I feel that I should have a right to get an education, too, and it shouldn’t matter that my family doesn’t have enough money to send me to college.” Then, before he could be laughed out of the room, Rocky added quickly: “It so happened that my family had enough money.”

U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was having trouble on another stage. He collaborated on a Swedish translation of esoteric U.S. Writer Djuna Barnes’s allusive verse play, The Antiphon, which opened in Stockholm. Critics thought the play largely unintelligible, though one exonerated Hammarskjold, explaining that the translation job was “overwhelmingly difficult—almost like bringing order to the Congo.”

From his 115-acre, upstate New York farm, Breed Improver and erstwhile Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace, 72, came to the defense of the harried incumbent, Orville Freeman. Also taking credit for an old idea and phrase while he was about it, the ex-Vice President wrote to a columnist last week: “[Freeman’s] statements thus far have been all to the good. In fact, like his boss, he has adopted some of my statements like ‘We should look on the farm surplus as a blessing instead of a curse.’ You, of course, remember my book, New Frontiers, brought out in 1934.”

Despite his father’s hard-earned advice—”Be a scientist or a professor like your grandfather but never an actor”—handsome, crooked-smiling Sean Flynn, 19, a chip off swashbuckling Errol Flynn by his first wife Lily Damita, is ready to go down to the sea in sets as the Son of Captain Blood. The film, now being hastily scenarioed, is the sequel—hopefully at the box office above all—of Errol Flynn’s pirate classic, Captain Blood. Untried on screen save for a bit part in Where the Boys Are, Sean charmed his way to the presidency of the freshman class at Duke University last fall, but left to hunt mountain lions in Arizona while waiting for Blood Jr. to coagulate.