PEOPLE

To the utter dismay of thousands of Brazilian ladies, that super soccer star known as Pelé announced his engagement to Rosemere Cholbi, 20, whom he had courted for five years. "I wanted a wife who likes Edson and not Pelé," said the man whose real name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento.

"Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise," Thomas Jefferson has exhorted us all, and as New York Mayor John Lindsay marched into office simultaneously with the city's crippling transit strike, here came, it was plain to see, the first Jeffersonian Republican. Already a confirmed milk-drinking, weight-lifting health bug, Lindsay set the public's pace by hiking the four miles to his new job in a cool 50 minutes the first day, a sizzling 47 the next. But while some fellow New Yorkers whizzed expeditiously by on skates and bikes, others, like Old Pal Sugar Ray Robinson, cheerfully followed the leader (below).

He was out of work and, could be, they were out of ideas. At any rate, a Manhattan publicity firm got in touch with ex-White House Chef René Verdon and proposed that he cook up a black bear ragout or a wild boar barbecue or something on that order to herald the opening of the International Sport and Camping Show. M. Verdon, who was fazed by the likes of baked red snapper girdled by cold beets while serving the Johnson family, is perhaps more accustomed to the outlandish than one might suppose: at last word, he had yet to reject the $1,000 offer.

Back in his Rangoon college days when he was a boxing fan, U Thant's approach to the sport was strictly Buddhistic. Suppose, said the U.N. Secretary General, that a Burmese boxer and a foreign boxer happened to be fighting for a title. Though Burmese himself, "I could watch the progress of the boxing match without any emotional reaction. I would not feel one way or the other whatever the result of the match might be." It was all a matter of "overcoming certain types of emotion" in accordance with his Buddhist upbringing. "I was trained to regard humanity as a whole and not in terms of segments or divisions constituting the whole. Local interests became subordinated to national interests [and] national interests were subordinated to human interests."

Back in 1961, when Horsewoman Joan Whitney Payson was about to sink $4.5 million into the new National League team, the New York Mets, Songwriter Alan Jay Lerner was offered a chance to buy a 20% share for himself. Lerner, a steadfast baseball nut, reluctantly declined, but guesses now that maybe he made the best move after all. "Although it would have been a fabulously profitable investment," says Lerner, "I'm afraid I would have paid so much attention to the team that I'd never have written Camelot or On a Clear Day—or anything else for the rest of my life."

Since he shoots up where the 90s leave off and the 100s begin, Nevada's Democratic Governor Grant Sawyer, expressing it politely, can be had at golf. So for his birthday his anxious staff gave him a box of golf balls—each ball bearing a smiling, full-color portrait of Lieutenant Governor Paul Laxalt, the Republican candidate for governor this coming fall. Says an aide: "We feel these may help Governor Sawyer keep his head down while putting more muscle into his swing."

A man of protean profession, Primo Carnera has been a cement worker, a sideshow freak, a carnival wrestler, a movie bit player and a prizefighter who won a number of his engagements under, well, peculiar circumstances. Yet at 59 the onetime (1933) heavyweight champion of the world is still going strong. Currently the proprietor of a tiny liquor shop set amidst used-car lots in Glendale, Calif., the Leaning Tower of Pizza, as they called him once, hopes to return to Italy next year and there distill vodka. Of all things. Not really, says Pina Carnera, the woman who married Primo 27 years ago "because I was very close to my mother and I saw my mother in that man." It will be vodka because vodka is made in Primo's home town and "because vodka is strong, just like Primo Carnera."

What he wanted for Christmas, Liberace told himself, was one of those nice big yachts everybody's getting—one, say, about 90 feet long. But he's still looking. Apart from majestic appearance, the ample size is necessary to accommodate the breadth and draft of a grand piano, and already one boat Liberace liked has been passed up because piano movers gave it a thumbs-down. If ever he gets the dream-boat he wants, he plans to call it Candelabra.

"At 15 I could hustle pool with the best of them," allowed Hollywood's James Garner, reflectively savoring an Oklahoma childhood spent at the tutorial elbow of Indian Jack Jacobs. And it may be that very little of that touch has been lost in the years since Indian Jack went off to a rambunctious career in professional football. Garner, matched against professional Rudolph Wanderone in a pilot television program called Celebrity Billiards (below), beat the formidable "New York Fats" (alias "Minnesota Fats") two of three games of eight ball for the $1,000 prize. Or did that merely make for better theater? To a charge of bowing to Garner for effect, the best hustler hustling equivocated. "If I blew the marble, it was my own fault."

TWO PHOTOS