Married. Constance Bennett, 40, durably blonde cinema leading light, and Colonel John Theron Coulter, 34, wartime chief of staff of the A.T.C.'s Pacific Division; she for the fifth time, he for the second; in Riverside, Calif. Her former husbands: wealthy Chester Moorehead, the late millionheir Phil Plant, the Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye, Actor Gilbert Roland.

Divorced. Damon Runyon, 61, Hearst-while sportswriter, past master of the Broadway-patter short story; by Patrice del Grande Runyon, 40, onetime actress; after 14 years of marriage, no children; in Key West, Fla.

Died. Major General Hugh J. Gaffey, 50, Patton's grey, granite chief of staff, who took command of the 4th Armored Division in December 1944, led it in its famed relief of surrounded Bastogne and its rapier thrust to the Rhine; in a 6-25 crash; at Fort Knox, Ky.

Died. Leathern D. Smith, 62, "the Henry Kaiser of Great Lakes shipbuilding"; by drowning; in Lake Michigan's Green Bay, Wis. Shipbuilder Smith's sloop, the Half Moon (once James Roosevelt's), capsized in a storm; sole survivor (of a yachting party of five) was his daughter Patsy, 18. With the only lifebelt her father had time to snatch she stayed afloat for nearly seven hours, swam and floated 13 miles before she crawled ashore.

Died. William S. (for Shakespeare) Hart, 73, gun-toting defender of law & order in cinema's oldtime, strong, silent Westerns; in Los Angeles. Producer, director and star, Bill Hart made "more money than anyone could ever spend," in 1925 retired, bought a ranch, nostalgically fixed it up with all the paraphernalia of the old West.

Died. Walter A. Sheaffer, 78, founder and longtime president of the W. A. Sheaffer Pen Co., who dreamed up the "lifetime guarantee" sales promotion for the lever-operated, self-filling fountain pens which he perfected; after long illness; in Fort Madison, Iowa.

Died. Louise Whitfield Carnegie, 89, reclusive relict of the late great steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie; in the Manhattan mansion where she lived except for annual summer migrations to Skibo Castle, the Carnegie estate in Scotland. Daughter of a wealthy New York lawyer, she never forgot her tough Scottish husband's dictum when they were married (he at 51, she at 30): "No lady should ever be in the limelight." But it was she who suggested the golf-course meeting between Carnegie and Charles M. Schwab which gave birth to the Carnegie-to-Morgan sellout (the U.S. Steel Corp., and a new era in U.S. business).

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