PEOPLE
Did the hair-tonic company that signed Oriole Brooks Robinson to do a commercial some months ago realize that he is half bald? It did not. Someone had shown the tonic tycoons an eight-year-old picture of a younger and hairier Robinson. But having already greased Robinson's palm, they were not about to let their investment go to waste. They suggested that Brooksie let what little hair he had grow through the winter, until it made up in length what it lacked in numbers, and last week they combed the elongated locks over the Robinson bare spots and filmed the commercial anyway.
On his way back from offering to play political ball with Egypt's President Nasser, East Germany's Communist boss Walter Ulbricht stopped off in hot-as-Hades Port Said and tossed out a real one to some local volleyball players (below). "I like sports," said the fun-loving old Berlin Wall builder. "They keep you from getting old."
Leo the Lip, long conceded to be a terror, is about to become a horror. The Ministers, a top-rated TV serial featuring a family of friendly neighborhood-type monsters, has signed Leo Durocher as a guest star. Plainly, nice ghouls finish first.
When four Texas legislators decided to begin a program of physical fitness, they hied themselves to the University of Texas gym for a workout. There Representatives Dick McKissack, David Ivy, Jim Wade and John Wright made the mistake of challenging four students to a game of half-court basketball. Their fitness program was short-lived and so, very nearly, were the legislators. Wade fell and sprained an ankle, Ivy broke his glasses, McKissack got a bloody nose and Wright collapsed after two minutes of play.
Jean Martinon, spare, white-haired conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, last week tried to explain his two favorite sports—skiing and mountain climbing—to hisancient counterpart, Conductor Charles Munch. "In both," he said, "You are in the mountains, where you become a freer man. But, psychologically, skiing is a sport in which you must go downhill. Mountain climbing is a sport of ascent. In skiing there is much more competition, which spoils something of it for me. In mountain climbing nobody praises you for what you do well. You do it well for the beauty of the thing."
As if wrestling with problems in Alabama and Vietnam were not enough, Lyndon B. Johnson suddenly found himself in an Indian wrestling match with TV's Lucille Ball. At a White House gathering for the Easter Seal drive of which she is chairman, Lucy told L.B.J. that he was the second President she had shaken hands with. The first was Eisenhower. According to Washington Newsman George Dixon, Lucy said: "Ike wasn't really trying to shake my hand. He was just trying to jerk me along so I wouldn't clog up a receiving line. Here—let me show you." And with that, Lucy reached out and practically jerked Lyndon right off his feet.
To make the season's last run down St. Moritz's awesome Cresta more chilling than usual, eccentric Swiss playboy Jean (Cha Cha) Theler bet eccentric German playboy Gunter Sachs that he, Theler, could guide a "skeleton" sled down the icy run in bare feet. He made it all the way to the bottom, thereby winning his 500 francs, but at the cost of being unable to walk on his bruised and frostbitten toes for several days. That did not prevent the exuberant Cha Cha from swinging on one of the Palace Hotel's chandeliers at his victory celebration, breaking up other assorted furniture and getting a spaghetti-and-tomato-sauce shampoo. Meanwhile, back at city hall, the wealthiest per capita sit-in on record protested local authorities' ban on car racing on frozen Lake St. Moritz. After Prince Alfonso Hohenlohe-Langenburg and some 60 others had blocked traffic for 40 minutes, police ended the demonstration by dragging away the millionaires.
In Missouri, anyway, it's better to be a fourth-place coach than a first-place politico. According to a survey just made public by a University of Missouri professor, 67% of Missourians identified Football Coach Dan De-vine, despite his fourth-place finish in the Big Eight. Only 40% recognized Missouri's newly elected Governor Warren Hearnes.
"My favorite spectator sport," Birdman Alfred Hitchcock told a newsman who shouldn't have asked him in the first place, "is murder. I love to watch it."
Regular patrons of the Queen's Head pub in Newton, Cambridgeshire giggled into their pints of stout. There at the dart-board firing line was Empress Farah of Iran (below), taking a most unorthodox grip on her first dart. The snickers abruptly drowned in good English brew, as the Empress, a guest of British Foreign Undersecretary Lord Walston, placed three darts in the inner circle around the bull's-eye. Farah's royal husband did less well. Two out of three of his darts missed the board entirely.
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