People: Nov. 9, 1970

Two ladies from the U.S.S.R. were doing their bit for culture in London last week. For Lydia Gromyko, wife of Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, it was horticulture, as she dutifully sniffed and stared at the wares in the late autumn show of the Royal Horticultural Society. For Ballerina Natalia Makarova, who defected a couple of months ago from Russia and the Kirov Ballet, it was the Black Swan pas de deux from Swan Lake, danced for the cameras of the BBC with her fellow defector Rudolf Nureyev—a star at the Kirov when she was in the corps de ballet. “Who would have believed we would ever dance together again?” breathed Natalia. “An absolutely exquisite dancer,” raved Nuri.

Fresh out of jail, the member for Mid-Ulster wore a bright red pantsuit to Britain’s House of Commons for her swearing-in ceremony. Bernadette Devlin, who calls the destruction of the established order “my way of life,” said she’d go a-rioting no more. Declared the young woman who was convicted of inciting to riot: “Rioting is an ineffective way of trying to gain one’s ends.” How about democratic means? “I am in Parliament,” said Devlin, “with the intention of using it for my own ends.”

Denmark’s heiress apparent, Princess Margrethe, carefully curbs any tendencies toward royal posturing in her two-year-old son, Prince Frederik. During his afternoon strolls, he likes to slosh in puddles like any other toddler. Even so, passers-by cannot help but note that whoever that kid is in the gutter near the Amalienborg Palace, he sits there as if he owned the place.

Beautiful, blue-eyed and adored, Actor-Producer Paul Newman professes to know nothing about sex appeal. “I’m bewildered by it,” he told TV Interviewer David Frost. He does know, though, why he and Wife Joanne Woodward get along so well: “We have absolutely no common interests at all.”

Dr. Timothy Leary seems to be turning into a one-man Diaspora. Since he escaped from a minimum-security prison in California, where he was serving a one-to-ten-year sentence on a pot rap, the former Harvard psychologist and LSDemon has been hustled in and out of Arab airports by unsympathetic authorities. In Algiers they canceled his announced press conference with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Leary and three traveling companions next surfaced in Beirut. They were supposed to “study the methods of the Palestinian revolutionaries,” but neither Jordan nor Syria would have them. Cairo let them stay overnight at an airport hotel and take a quick squint at the Pyramids before packing them back to Algiers. Where next? He wanted to talk to the North Koreans, Leary told reporters. Later he announced that he would enter the U.S. in disguise to attend a Panther rally in New Haven (“There will be many surprises that day”). Later still he said that he would become a Moslem and try to stick it out in Algiers. “I figure that if I return to the U.S.,” he said, “I’ll goto prison for a total of 38 years.”

Ever since his 1958 release from a Washington mental hospital, Poet Ezra Pound has been living obscurely in Italy. But not obscurely enough to prevent herds of hopeful interviewers, clusters of camera crews and packs of autograph hounds from rallying for his 85th birthday last week. It was all too much. A planned party was canceled, and Pound’s longtime companion, Olga Rudge, whisked the fierce old birthday boy away to wait for the fuss to subside.

Along with their heavy music, the Rolling Stones and those who have been rolling with them have run up some heavy bills. As an aftermath of their U.S. trip last year, the tour promoters of Mick Jagger’s British rock group are facing a judgment for $24,000 worth of unpaid transportation and restaurant bills and a claim for $16,000 by Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. Their notorious concert at the Altamont Speedway in California, where things got so unstuck that a member of the audience was murdered, has brought three more suits. One, from the mother of the victim, is for $500,000.

Pol-Poet Eugene McCarthy advised his followers last week not to throw away their old McCarthy buttons. “If nothing else, they’ll be worth something on the antiques market.” Whatever happens, he’ll be glad to get out of the Senate when his term expires in January. “When somebody runs for President and comes back,” explained the Minnesota Democrat, “he’s not treated the same. He’s rejected, the way it was when Lazarus came back from the dead. They wouldn’t deal him in the card game —they thought he might have learned something on the other side.” Spiro Agnew’s speeches? “I think his rhetoric is the best thing about him—it’s his ideas that disturb me.”

Speaking at a Johns Hopkins University forum, Costa Rica’s President José Figueres was asked a question about his little country’s role in the Central American Common Market. “Costa Rica isn’t a country,” said its President. “It’s a pilot project.”