People, Oct. 19, 1959 | TIME

Last June, a well-fabricated girl named Madelyn Darrow, 24, better known to the sudsy electorate (22 million votes cast last year) as Miss Rheingold of 1958, wandered onto the courts of the Los Angeles Tennis Club hoping to pick up some pointers on the game. Last week it developed that Madelyn had not only improved her racket technique but had also picked up her teacher. Her fiancée: famed Tennistar Pancho Gonzales, 31, who will marry her as soon as his California divorce is final in December.

TV Impresario Arthur Godfrey, 56, mending after lung cancer surgery (TIME, May 11), popped up in Oklahoma City to accept a bronze plaque from the conventioning Air Traffic Control Association. The award was given in salute to Godfrey’s frequent airing of problems in the plane-filled skies.

In Paris, an alert lensman waited in ambush for retired Cinemactress Greta Garbo, 54. caught her without sunglasses as she emerged from the fashion house of Lanvin.

After years of yearning to shoot straight in a horse opera, Singer-Actor Sammy Davis Jr. got his wish, was exuberant after filming an all-Negro oater for CBS-TV’s Zane Grey Theater. Wispy (5 ft. 6 in., 125 Ibs.) Sammy had been pessimistic about the prospects of ever persuading a producer to dramatize any epic pitting dark skins against red skins: “They’ll never do it! But if they do, it’ll be the first time they let the Indians win!” In the current saga, Davis plays a corporal in a cavalry unit assigned to haul a friendly Indian to a peace parley. Time: the early 1870s. The villains are Apaches, but Corporal Davis outfoxes them in the end by sacrificing his own life in a ruse to deliver the good Indian to the summit. Upshot: the bad Indians lose.

Though she flatly denied that it ever happened, Washington Hostess with Almost the Mostes’ Gwen Cafritz was flatly contradicted by Washington Daily News Columnist Carol LeVarn. What Gwen told Carol, according to Carol: “You never know who men are at parties. The other night at dinner I sat next to a good-looking grey-haired man and I picked up his place card. It said. ‘Mr. McDonald.’ Well, Mr. McDonald could be anybody. I said, ‘What do you do, Mr. McDonald?’ and he said, ‘You dumb broad, I’m on the front pages all over the country!’ I: Gwen’s dinner companion: striking A.F.L.-C.I.O. Steelworkers Boss David McDonald (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

A ponderous electric hobby horse, on which Calvin Coolidge took frequent constitutionals while in the White House, was presented to the Forbes Library in Coolidge’s home town, Northampton, Mass., where Coolidge’s widow Grace dwelt until her death in 1957. The 220-volt contraption, on which Silent Cal often played cowboy with the chief of his personal Secret Service guards, is triple-gaited and can also pitch as if going over jumps. It will be put to pasture in the library’s Coolidge Room.

The world’s best-known rejected suitor, ex-R.A.F. Group Captain Peter Townsend, 44, found a new bride-to-be four years after Britain’s Princess Margaret sadly said no. In Brussels, it was announced that he will marry Marie-Luce (“Mosquito”) Jamagne, 20, daughter of a prosperous Antwerp cigarette maker. Barred from marriage to Margaret because of his previous divorce, Airman Townsend first met Marie-Luce when she was 15, took her along last year as a photographer when he repeated highlights of his round-the-world journey before movie cameras. Since Marie-Luce is a Roman Catholic, his “delicate” status as a divorced man still plagues him.

Winthrop Rockefeller, 47, sometime playboy, now Arkansas’ most sophisticated gentleman farmer and a sponsor of industrialization in his adopted state, seemed verging on a political career. He allowed that he might just like to be the next Governor of Arkansas. But with typical Rockefeller aplomb, he made his ambitions sound selfless. Said the brother of New York’s Republican Governor: “I would not ever run as a Democrat, but would take an independent stand. Unfortunately, the Republican label is still fatal in Arkansas. What the South needs is a real two-party system. If I could do anything to further this, I would.”

Second Lady Patricia Nixon confided to a capital newshen that she has long kept a daily diary. What’s more, said Pat, she was advised by Nina Khrushchev, during Grandma Nina’s recent visit, that she should expand her jottings into a book. But Diarist Nixon is compiling her memoirs for only two eventual readers: daughters Tricia, 13, and Julie, 11.

Embarking from Marseille on a five-month cruise to the Far East, old (85) Author W. Somerset Maugham snorted at a rumor that he is penning a new novel. Although Maugham has had done with writing many times, he made it sound almost authentic this time. “Listen!” he erupted. “I’m only an extinct volcano!”

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