PEOPLE
Elvis Presley has a passion for golf carts. Not for golf, just for golf carts. He keeps at least two on the MGM lot to get around in while he is working. At the moment Elvis and Nancy Sinatra are busy on something called Speedway, a film in which Elvis plays a stock-car racer and Nancy, more improbably, a tax collector. Elvis gallantly loaned Nancy one of his carts. Just a little one, though—not his special cart, which holds 12 people and makes greenskeepers around the country grateful indeed that he does not play golf.
Trumpeter and Cardinal fan Harry James has made his plans for October. He has had a clause written into his Lake Tahoe nightclub contract excusing him from active duty in October while the Cards are playing in the Series.
When he took over the ballroom at New York's Plaza Hotel for a party of 540 it did not occur to anyone to accuse Author Truman Capote of thinking small. However, British Television Satirist David Frost recently rented the White City, a London stadium that accommodates 35,000 for his party of only 200. But then Mr. Frost's plans for the evening were pretty vigorous. A number of his invitations included cards which read, "Congratulations. You have been chosen to take part in one of the sports events." Until such guests—presumably those least prone to heart attacks—arrived, they didn't know whether they had been elected to bicycle, hurdle, play football or join in egg-and-spoon, sack and three-legged races. In any case, by 11 p.m. all of these activities were a challenge. As Frost's secretary observed, "At that hour and after a good dinner I found it excessively difficult to keep the egg in the spoon," and she is reported as not having stayed the course. Singer Julie Felix fell down a lot, but won the sack race. Two members of Frost's TV show, John Cleese and Graham Chapman, won the wheelbarrow race and Frost's own team achieved a 2-1 victory at soccer. The brief match was refereed by the manager of the Chelsea Football Club. He may never have seen anything quite like it.
One would think that Astronaut Gordon Cooper would be ready to settle down and grow petunias in his backyard, but there he was last week clamoring to get into an Indianapolis car. At a press conference he spoke up for Andy Granatelli's turbire, then took a turn around the Brickyard. "I'd say there is a very definite probability that I'll be driving at Indianapolis soon," he announced. Next thing you know, A. J. Foyt will be zooming into space.
Former Las Vegas Showgirl Georgi Edwards is ore of the few women around who fails to see the humor in Kipling's famous old line, "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke." Georgi was scheduled to wed Philip Crosby, Bing's son, at half past eight on the evening of Tuesday, July 11. At half past eight Georgi was ready and so were the 50 guests assembled by the lantern-lit pool at the home of an Albuquerque friend, but Phil was assembled in front of the television set watching the All-Star Game. Putting first things (to him) first, Phil stuck with the All-Stars until Tony Perez finally did Georgi and the National League the favor of hitting his 375-foot homer. The couple was married at 9:15.
Well, to each athlete his own training methods. Race Driver Graham Hill (below, left) seems to prefer working out in the air. World Middleweight Champion Nino Benvenuti (below, right) prefers the water and skis. Benvenuti is looking ahead to his September bout with Emile Griffith, and Nino's trainer, Libero Golinelli, in an effort to fend off boredom, has him on a schedule that also involves yachting and trips to the mountains. Hill (an unboreable man), on the other hand, pretty much confined his training for last Saturday's British Grand Prix to jumping up and down on the trampoline in his garden. "My first trampoline was a small one intended for my three children...but I became so interested in it myself that I bought a much larger one so that I could use it as well," Hill said last week. He should have bounced his Lotus Ford a few times, though. The car's suspension lasted only three-quarters of the way through the race and Graham Hill, healthy as he was, was out.
Jack Kramer survived the strain of competing—and winning—at Wimbledon 20 years ago, but the strain of talking about Wimbledon is so great that once it is all over he has to go and lie down. Kramer has just finished his eighth year as a TV commentator for the matches, and he confides that the whole business leaves him in a state of collapse. Last year he hit upon a remedy: he did his collapsing on the beach at Biarritz and found it so much more satisfying than going home to bed in Los Angeles that this year he has elected to go again to France, to the Le Lys Club outside of Paris. What exhausts Kramer is the strain of talking for 10 hours a day, all the while worrying that he is being repetitious. He has our admiring sympathy. Worry that they are being repetitious seems to be the last thought in the world to cross the minds of most sporting commentators.
TWO PHOTOS