People, May 24, 1971

Awarded the prestigious Dutch Order of Orange Nassau in Amsterdam last week, Pianist Artur Rubinstein, 85, declared: “I’m grateful, and happy, for the fact that you haven’t had enough of me after 45 years.” And he added generously: “Holland is one of the most musical countries in the world.” Among those who obviously agree is another maestro—World Heavyweight Champion Joe Frazier, 27, who picked the Dutch city of Tilburg to open his European concert tour last week with his Knockouts and the Parkette Dancers.

Scene One: First-class section of a New York-to-Boston airliner. Conservative Writer William F. Buckley Jr. is discovered tapping diligently at a typewriter on his lap. Enter Liberal Writer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on his way to the tourist section. He spots Buckley and stops to needle him about preparing so frantically for the public debate scheduled to take place between them in Boston that evening. Scene Two: Tourist compartment. Schlesinger receives small package from stewardess. He unwraps it, finds cigar with a note: “Arthur—this is my contribution to your last meal. Bill.” Scene Three: Logan Airport, Boston. Buckley and Schlesinger meet after disembarking from plane. Schlesinger: “Now I understand what’s wrong with American conservatives. They may travel first class, but they smoke terrible cigars.” Scene Four: The debating platform, Newton College of the Sacred Heart. Buckley: “It’s unwise for Schlesinger to mention cigars—it may remind people of his role in the Bay of Pigs.”

When the future Archbishop of Canterbury wanted to find out a thing or two about sex, he didn’t wait around. “I began learning about sex before I was ten,” the Most Rev. Michael Ramsey told Interviewer Jimmy Saville on Britain’s Speak Easy radio show. “I wanted to know where babies came from. I’m in favor of sex education for children. But it must be the very best kind.”

“Radical Chic” was the epigram with which Writer Tom Wolfe skewered a party given by Conductor-Composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife to raise a defense fund for the 13 New York Black Panthers just acquitted of conspiracy (see THE NATION). That widely publicized gathering last year proved to be a debacle for Bernstein—he was booed on the podium, picketed by the Jewish Defense League, editorially scolded by the New York Times, and flooded with hate-mail. Nothing daunted, however, the persistent Bernsteins last week gave another political party in their Park Avenue pad. This time, it was Catholic Chic: 125 guests (including Producer-Director Harold Prince, Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim and Cartoonist-Playwright Jules Feiffer) raised some $35,000 to help defend Father Philip Berrigan, Sister Elizabeth McAlister, and the other six antiwarriors accused of plotting to kidnap Henry A. Kissinger and blow up some of the federal heating system. For some reason, nobody from the press was invited.

Mr. Benjamin Sonnenberg, 70, is one of the master builders of that great, glittering curtain wall known as Public Relations. He is also, perhaps, his own most successful client—Ben’s elegantly Edwardian style has long been a Manhattan happening, and he lives, and grandly entertains, in one of the city’s last great houses. From the felicitously festooned walls of his century-old mansion on Gramercy Park, Sonnenberg selected 64 portrait drawings of the past 150-odd years for an exhibition that opened last week at the Pierpont Morgan Library. The show includes a Van Gogh, two Modiglianis and a Saul Steinberg (of Sonnenberg). A rich potpourri of New York, N.Y., turned out for the opening—literary, artistic, social—a p.r. man’s dream. One well-known mustached face was missing, though—Ben Sonnenberg’s. Too shy.

One of the things that long John Kenneth Galbraith has been, besides U.S. Ambassador to India, is a trustee of Harvard’s Radcliffe College. This may or may not lend weight to the opinions on women he expressed last week to an interviewer (female) for the London Times. “I feel very angry when I think of brilliant, or even interesting women whose minds are wasted on a ‘home,’ ” said Economist Galbraith. “Better have an affair,” he says. “It isn’t so permanent, and you keep your job.” Marital bliss? “The happiest time of anyone’s life is just after the first divorce. People are much happier then than when they are first married.” Women would be happier, says Galbraith, if they were not trapped into looking after the children. It is “nonsense” to think they are better equipped for this role than men. Galbraith speaks archly from long experience. He has been married for 33 years, and his only wife, Kitty, has done most of the child rearing. “But that is as it should be. I am a better writer than she is.” He admits, however, that there may be some women whose rightful place is in the home: “Make no mistake, I’m not against those who would rather stay at home to look after their husbands and children. If a woman is content to confine herself to leaping in and out of bed, that is her sovereign right. Also good exercise.”