People: Dec. 9, 1966

Will Junior abide by Dad’s decisions?

“You bet I will,” said Earl Warren Jr., 36. As a matter of fact, young Earl had nothing but praise for the sort of decisions that have been made by his father’s U.S. Supreme Court in recent years. “They are recognizing the laws as they originally were intended to be,” he explained. Now Junior will be able to make a few decisions of his own. California’s outgoing Governor Pat Brown, an old family friend, has named Earl, a lawyer and registered Democrat, as a Sacramento municipal-court judge.

Judging from the lad’s hard-charging form at halfback, England’s World Cup champion soccer team will have a good prospect in another dozen years. One day a week, Britain’s Prince Andrew, 6, motors out from Buckingham Palace with his nanny and his detective to mix it up with some of the local stars at the public playground in Cale Street, Chelsea. Andrew tears around the blacktop like a pale Pelé, but he does seem to be more careful than his big brother. At Scotland’s Gordonstoun School a couple of months ago, Bonny Prince Charlie emerged from a game of rugby with a broken nose.

The 1839 Stranger’s Guide to the City of Washington advises: “You will neither chew tobacco in the lady’s drawing room nor swallow the warm water contained in the finger bowls.” Well that doesn’t hardly happen any more. Still, the Woman’s National Democratic Club decided that it was time for a new primer for capital hostesses and published Party Diary: Planning Ahead and the “Fete” Accompli, a 100-page guidebook anthologizing social notes and comments from the city’s experts. “To be a success in Washington, you need comfortable shoes,” advises outdoorsy Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. Hostess Gwen Cafritz purrs modestly: “With my little dinners I like to feel I am helping to save Western civilization.” And Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, had her motto for a lively party embroidered on a sofa pillow: “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.”

All week rumors buzzed that the phantom was dying. As usual, Multimillionaire Industrialist Howard Hughes, 60, remained shrouded in a private world, expensively and almost pathologically guarded from outsiders. The stories said that Hughes, suffering from emphysema and Addison’s disease, went to Boston for treatment four months ago, ensconced himself in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he rented the entire fifth floor and posted armed guards to keep newsmen away. Was the tenant really Hughes? Reporters picked up a trail when they heard that Hughes was spirited off by private train to Las Vegas and carried on a stretcher at 4 a.m. to a penthouse bastion at the Desert Inn. The hotel doesn’t even show that he is registered, and a spokesman put out the word: “He’s never been in better health.” But then how would the spokesman know?

For a month after the Episcopal House of Bishops censured his “irresponsibility” in matters of doctrine, Bishop James A. Pike, 53, maintained an uncharacteristic silence. “Only God knows everything,” he explained at last in an Advent address in Manhattan’s St. Thomas Church. “Keeping quiet at some points is a question of knowing one’s place before God.” Then Pike resumed his place as his church’s champion of unorthodoxy: “The church seems to prefer prefab answers. But when we try to erect finalities, we fall into the worst heresy of all—idolatry.”

After chugging through a lecture on corporate finance at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., New York Central Railroad President Alfred Perlman, 64, had some rueful observations about the finances of the iron-horse business. “Most people don’t like to go somewhere tied down by a train schedule,” he said. “This means going by car. It’s only when it’s snowing that you like to go back to the good old days on trains.” Then with a wry smile, he admitted: “I have a pass on the New Haven Railroad, but to get there, I drove my car.”

At the end of his 19-day tour through the simmering Middle East, Massachusetts’ Senator Teddy Kennedy, 34, at last found a relatively peaceful spot. In the Judean hills west of Jerusalem, at Israel’s John F. Kennedy Memorial Shrine, he unveiled a bronze plaque bearing a likeness of his brother. The first member of the family to visit the shrine since it was completed last August, Teddy called it “a fitting expression to the aspirations of permanent peace to which President Kennedy was dedicated.” He winced when he saw that someone had fired two bullets through the windows of the shrine.

If he had seen a flagrant boo-boo like that, any field judge would have tossed down his yellow flag and penalized Navy 15 yards for having an ineligible receiver downfield. Right now, though, Navy’s 1963 All-America Quarterback Roger Staubach, 24, pretty much has to throw to his old teammate, former Navy Guard Fred Marlin, 26. There aren’t too many other decent receivers at the U.S. naval base at Danang in South Viet Nam, where Ensign Staubach is stationed as a supply officer. Jolly Roger keeps his passing arm limbered up by working out with Fred in the loading areas—and there’s still talk that he’ll give the pros a try when his tour of duty is ended in 1969.

When she was named Miss World last month, India’s Reita Faria, 23, intended to pass up the usual tours and hurry back to medical school in Bombay. But later she sighed: “It would be almost impossible to get back to my studies—too many interviews and disturbances.” So she agreed to go along with Bob Hope’s Christmas troupe to Viet Nam, and that caused quite a disturbance in her neutralist homeland. Before long, even the Indian Foreign Office was pressuring her to cancel out so as not to lend her country’s name to the U.S. war effort. After brooding on the matter, Reita announced: “If the show were going to Viet Nam, the Viet Cong or even the moon, I would go. I would like my government and the people of India to realize that this title has nothing to do with politics.”