People: Jun. 1, 1962

Movie Star Dina Merrill has parts aplenty to occupy her working hours, three sparkling children to brighten her home life, a few well-bred lines in the Social Register, and enough money to buy Hollywood—her mother is Marjorie Post May of the $100 million Post Toasties fortune, and her husband. Stanley Rumbough, gets a big squeeze from the Colgate toothpaste tube. To top it off, an extra little bibelot has now come Deenie’s way. “As a token of affection,” both her father-in-law and mother-in-law, whose deaths came four months apart, left her bequests of $1,000.

Under construction since 1958, Washington’s new $70 million House office building will not be ready for its congressional tenants until 1964, but it already has an honored name. Whisked through Congress with the sort of bipartisan speed that would have pleased him was a resolution naming the edifice after the late Sam Rayburn, the man who served longer as Speaker—17 years—than any other. By the same resolution, two nearby House office buildings will now be known after a couple of Mister Sam’s Republican predecessors—one, built in 1908, for iron-willed Joseph Gurney (“Uncle Joe”) Cannon, who reigned from 1903 to 1911, the other, finished in 1933, for Nicholas Longworth.

Speaker from 1925 to 1931.

As it must to all movie stars, the nude scene came to Marilyn Monroe. That long-ago calendar shot when she was 17 was almost forgotten, and MM hardly needed the publicity. But it was really in the script of Something’s Got to Give, and perfectionist Director George Cukor said no to the flesh-colored “nude suit” Marilyn wanted to wear. Cukor cleared the set of “all males not actually involved in the production,” admonished electricians to “turn around,” and Marilyn slipped into the pool like Botticelli’s Venus, while cameras whirred. As she paddled around, the chief electrician shouted, “Bobby, make your No. 10 a little higher.” It was later reported that at this point Marilyn said very distinctly: “I hope Bobby is a girl.”

Suitably stern when she played the wrinkled, lace-capped queen in NBC’s Victoria Regina, Julie Harris, 36, melted in tears when the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded her an Emmy as best actress of the year. Two other figurines went to the 90-minute adaptation of Laurence Housman’s 1935 play: for best show of the year and best supporting actress. Pamela Brown.

Examining the brave new worlds dreamed up by Utopians from Plato to H. G. Wells, astringent British Author Aldous Huxley, 67, concluded that, “luckily for humanity,” not one of them “could ever be fully actualized.” Even the best-intentioned of the lot, said Huxley to the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in Manhattan, would have created societies “as horribly inhuman as Orwell’s 1984” or his own Brave New World. More’s Utopia, said he, is “paternalistic state socialism administered like an old-fashioned boarding school”; Plato advocated childhood conditioning, censorship and “compulsory virtue”; Fourier had “a pathological lust for social tidiness.” Said Huxley: “Most utopists have had the souls, but happily not the effective power, of drill sergeants and dictators.” Blonde Jean Martin Black, 34, who used to croon coffee commercials for Chock Full O’Nuts when she was married to its bossman, had a heavenly idea. Since her niggardly $3,000-a-month alimony from ex-Husband William Black, 53, didn’t go very far after she paid her $1,100 rent at Manhattan’s Imperial House, why not move back in with him? Black thought the idea a bit nutty, considering the fact that he already had company at his place in Westchester—his bride of two months, brunette Singer Page Morton, 32. But dear Jean persisted, and the New York State Supreme Court finally had to tell her that three’s a crowd, even in 28 rooms. She might have had better luck with the place’s previous owner: Tommy Manville, who is now trying to discard wife No. 11.

The cannonading that echoes along London’s Fleet Street was suddenly stilled, and Britain’s battling press lords struck a truce flag to pay convivial tribute to one of their fellows. The men of war were all there, chatting with Sir Winston Churchill and Prime Minister Macmillan at a table in London’s imposing Warwick House—Roy Thomson of the Sunday Times, Cecil Harmsworth King of the Daily Mirror, Lord Rothermere of the Daily Mail, and the guest of honor, crusty, combative Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily Express, whose 83rd birthday prompted the shindig. “I felt that this was an occasion on which Fleet Street could forget its animosities,” said Rothermere, who arranged the affair. “But I assure you, they’ll be resumed tomorrow.” Said the Beaver: “I have destroyed completely the foolish maxim that the good die young.” “Trouble with me,” Horsewoman Liz Whitney Tippe+t, 55, once complained as she surveyed the thoroughbreds at her 4,000-acre Llangollen Farm in Virginia, “is that I’m always buying and never selling.” But Liz, a Main Line socialite who was John Hay Whitney’s first wife, has no such compunction about jewels.

Off to Manhattan’s Parke-Bernet Galleries went 23 of her spare baubles, from a $45 sapphire ring to a $47,000 pair of ruby-and-diamond earrings, for an auction that earned her $92,610 in loose change.

Liz, whose race horses alone brought her a tidy $254,855 last year, scarcely needs the money. Then how come the sale? “It’s last year’s jewelry,” said she.

Erstwhile Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., 47, now a new dealer in Jaguar and Fiat autos, found himself embroiled with the Treasury over his income tax. Accused of declaring only $29,026 instead of the $93,051 he actually earned in 1958, F.D.R. Jr. agreed to settle up on all but $18,615 of the difference. That money, he argued, was compensation from Playwright-Producer Dore Schary for loss of privacy caused by Sunrise at Campobello, a play on the life of F.D.R. Sr., and was nontaxable.

“This is a test case for the whole family, involving payments made to all of us,” said he. One member of the family was puzzled. Said Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt: “I never collected anything.” Curly-haired Crooner Eddie Fisher, 33, opened at Hollywood’s Cocoanut Grove, and everything came up roses—including a bouquet of 50 lavender long-stems from someone in Rome who signed herself “Elizabeth.” He sang an hour’s worth of love songs (This Nearly Was Mine, It Never Entered My Mind), got a standing ovation from a crowd of 1,000, hugs and handshakes from Mentor Eddie Cantor, and then went off to celebrate, flanked by Mike Todd Jr., son of Liz’s third husband, and blonde Actress Annette Cash, his current steady. Wrote Columnist Walter Winchell, on hand to cover the event: “He stopped the show colder than a faithless wife’s heart.” Never one to toe the party line, Soviet Poet Evgeny Evtushenlco, 28 (TIME cover, April 13), stomped all over it with dancing slippers. To the cultural commissars who have banned rock ‘n’ roll and the twist, Evtushenko wrote in Literaturnaya Gazeta: “Let everybody dance the way he likes.” To the Moiseyev dancers, who parodied rock ‘n’ roll during their U.S. tour with a bit called Back to the Apes, he added: “This is repulsive. In American workers’ clubs they dance it simply and beautifully.” As for the twist, said he: “Someone has said it is a product of capitalist society. I personally do not understand how dances can be divided into capitalist and socialist.”