People: Sep. 28, 1962

To get away from the daily hurly-burly that sometimes invades even the Vatican. Pope John XXIII has a lofty new retreat in which to meditate. The top three floors of the 9th century tower of San Giovanni, built by Pope Leo IV as a defense against marauding Saracens, have been fitted out with heaters for winter and air conditioning for summer, divided into a foyer, a circular salon opening on a library and studio, a dining room, bedroom and chapel. And from the wide terrace behind the battlements of the 100-ft.-high tower, the Pontiff has a splendid view of the Eternal City. So pleasant is the prospect that the Pope may elect to spend every summer there.

Few poets die wealthy, and lower-case Poet E. E. Cummings, who died three weeks ago, was no exception. In his will, signed with upper-case capitals and filed for probate in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court, he left personal possessions valued at a mere $15,000 to his wife Marion, and “suggested” that she give to their daughter, his sister and two close friends whatever “they’d enjoy remembering me by.”

To shouts of dobro pozhalovat (welcome ) from crowds of flower-bearing Russians, Composer Igor Stravinsky, 80, arrived at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport and set foot on his native soil for the first time in 52 years. For the frail, cane-carrying composer, whose symphonic ballets were branded “corrupt and bourgeois” during Stalin’s day, it was an emotional homecoming. “I left Czarist Russia and have returned to the Soviet Union, which I greet,” said Stravinsky in Russian. “It is a great joy.” After a tender meeting with a niece he had known only through an exchange of letters, Stravinsky was helped into a limousine and whisked in a motorcade to his hotel, where, fortified with vodka and caviar, he worked over the scores for three concerts with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, which will play excerpts from his modernistic The Fire Bird and Petmshka.

As the first guest on a new Canadian TV show, triple-tongued Producer David Susskind, 41, lost no time unsettling citizens on both sides of the border. Kissing off Canada as “a great chunk of geography limping painfully toward anonymity,” he quickly turned to a much broader subject—Susskind. “I would like very much to go into politics.” he said. President? “No Jewish person can be President of the United States. A Catholic just barely made it.” Senator? Yes. “I’d like to go into that solemn chamber, and make some sense.”

In a somber. 4OO-word statement printed in his own London Times, Baron Astor of Hever, 76, who was born in New York City and is the great-great-grandson of fur-trading Millionaire John Jacob Astor, announced that though he loves England dearly and will remain a loyal citizen, he simply cannot afford to die there. Because a newly adopted finance act imposes an 80% death duty on real property held overseas by any British subject who dies at home. Lord Astor, who owns an estimated $40 million in U.S. real estate, has decided to spend his last years in Southern France. “It is my firm hope,” he wrote, “that as a result, my descendants will be enabled to continue to uphold the family traditions and responsibilities.”

It was only for an hour, but in that brief time some 5,000 Indians and Pakistanis forgot their quarrels. From both sides of the border at West Dinajpur they gathered to joke, sip tea and pay homage to Vinoba Bhave, 67. a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi’s cult of Sarvodaya (Order of Truth and Non-Violence), who had just ended a 16-day walk across East Pakistan. Preaching the “oneness of humans” and asking for donations of land for redistribution among the local landless, the acharya (teacher), who in the past eleven years has walked 40,000 miles on his mission, was mobbed by both Moslems and Hindus on his latest trek, collected 120 precious acres in all.

At playing peekaboo with a process server. Mystery Man Howard Hughes, 56, has no peer. Until Hughes’s lawyers finally accepted service three weeks ago, the directors of Trans World Airlines had tried in vain for nearly a year to slap him with a subpoena in a $115 million damage suit. All the while, TWA had an artful dodger of its own: Ernest R. Breech, 65, the airline’s board chairman and former head of Ford, who has steered clear of New York State to avoid being nailed with a Hughes summons in a $336 million countersuit. Breech proved a mere neophyte at the game. Flying home to Detroit from a board meeting in Boston, Breech was peacefully ensconced in his seat when at 8:30 p.m. a Hughes process server ambled over and dropped a summons in his lap. Was it valid? Sure enough, at the time the subpoena was served, the plane was 25,000 ft. over Albany—in New York State.

Sold in an El Paso bankruptcy court: the assets of Texas Farm Boy Billie Sol Estes, 37. whose wealth, most of it tied up in what proved to be misbegotten fertilizer and grain-storage contracts, was estimated at $20 million before his shenanigans were discovered. Price to a San Antonio businessman named Morris Jaffe who will pay off Billie Sol’s creditors: $5,800,000.