People: Apr. 2, 1965

Louis Armstrong, 64, took his golden trumpet—blew—and the Wall didn’t come tumbling down. Never mind. It was a mighty blast anyway. Cheering throngs of East Berliners, from the youthful hip to the Party drip, shelled out a capitalistic 15 to 25 marks ($3.75 to $6.25) apiece just to soak up all that jazz. Playing to packed houses on his four-week trip behind the Iron Curtain, Satchmo neatly muted the inevitable questions on race and politics (“Some of my best friends are Southern whites,” he grinned) and gave the Volk encores and encores of Blueberry Hill and Hello, Dolly! Said he: “I’m an entertainer, and I’ll play for anybody who wants to hear me. I’ll play for Eskimos at the North Pole and penguins at the South Pole, with a stopover in the Virgin Islands to warm up.”

For 14 years in the Senate and two in the House, Florida’s Representative Claude Pepper, 64, wandered Capitol Hill, not precisely friendless but somehow incompleat. Then, this January, Texas Democrat Jake Pickle, 41, took his seat in the House. Before anyone could say rubber baby-buggy bumpers, the two sponsored H.R. 2465, modifying a portion of the social security laws. It will be known to one and all, naturally, as the Pickle-Pepper bill. Purpose? Whereas, would winsome widows winning their way with welfare wealth wed wooers on social security themselves, why wish widows and wooers to lose whatever combined welfare wealth weddings would work?

One of the sincerest compliments Pablo Picasso, 83, could pay a friend in the old days was, “he always knew how to touch the sore spot.” Not that Pablo was thin-skinned, understand. “People always tell untrue stories about me—let them,” he said. He did, until Françise Gilot, 43, his mistress from 1944 to 1954, mother of two of his children, and author of Life with Picasso, told how he kept a goat in the house, blew his stack because she borrowed a pair of his trousers when she outgrew her own clothes during pregnancy, and boasted that “no woman leaves a man like me.” Well, she did, and he filed suit in a Paris court seeking to halt the book’s serialization in Paris Match as an “intolerable intrusion.” “In discreet” perhaps, shrugged the court—but Pablo, voilà votre vie.

Whatever happened to Barbra Streisand, 22, the girl in the feather boa, the late suffragette dress, and whatever else was handy to “match”? For one thing, she’s making about $5,000 a week in Funny Girl, which is enough to enrich anyone’s tastes. Then CBS decided to show her all dressed up in its TV musical My Name Is Barbra late in April and marched her off to Manhattan’s Bergdorf-Goodman for fitting and filming. She tried on a $15,000 Somali leopard coat—and liked it! Next came a mink-lined velvet robe. “I used to hate mink but now I appreciate it for its solidarity,” cooed Barbra, adding that sable is solid too. Before the kookie crumbled completely, she slipped into a good old “poor girl” sweater, with a great swishy white hat that reminded her “a little of the Mad Hatter.” Ah, Funny Girl.

It doesn’t take much to start a TV trend, and under most circumstances the thing to expect would be whole squadrons of witches broomsticking along the air waves pretty soon, since ABC’s Bewitched won top ratings in its first season. But Samantha, in the shape of Elizabeth Montgomery, 31, is a tough girl to whammy. She’s going to be a pregnant witch. She has to be, because Liz expects her second child in October. “I don’t know who first brought it up,” says Producer Harry Ackerman, “but we suddenly decided it would be a fine idea if Samantha Stevens had a baby too.” Better still, the baby is going to be on the show—which more or less puts a double whammy on the opposition.

Consider the case of a public servant who gives 31 years of his life to the city he loves only to be pensioned off with a testimonial dinner and a drab little monthly check. You consider it. Vincent R. Impellitteri. 65, mayor of New York City from 1950 to 1953 and a municipal judge from then on, already has. Last week he received a $30,473.89 annual pension from the city’s Employee Retirement System, thus setting what is quite likely a record for a nonfederal employee. The taxpayers can relax, though. Impy, a veteran student of the pension system, got way up there by plowing about $200,000 of his own money into the fund.

She is “the incarnation of the American Spirit crusading for mankind,” said Lewis Douglas, former U.S. ambassador in London, but Mrs. Margaret Sanger, 81, pioneer advocate of birth control, was too aged and ill to respond from her Tucson nursing home to the praise heaped on her at a testimonial dinner near by. She smuggled the first contraceptive diaphragm into the U.S. in 1915, was arrested several times for trying to organize birth-control programs, and carried her crusade round the world. “I remember my mother in India hiding a book and small packages,” Madame B. K. Nehru told the guests. “The book was by Margaret Sanger. And when I married I, too, hid small packages and a book by Mrs. Sanger. Now we have come to where the President of the United States speaks on birth control.”