The Vatican confirmed that mellowing (57) Cinemactor Gary (Return to Paradise) Cooper, previously an Episcopalian, became a Roman Catholic early in April. Glowed his Roman Catholic wife Veronica, married to Coop for 26 years: "He's very happy about it."

Flying as a passenger in a T-33 jet over Colorado, Air Force Colonel John Paul Stapp, rocket-sledding holder of the world land speed record (632 m.p.h.), found himself in a jam when the plane's engine flamed out. No slouch in an emergency, Stapp ejected himself at "somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 feet," back-somersaulted four times, then opened his chute to float to earth. His only memorable injury: a chipped ankle bone. His pilot, Captain Harry B. Davis, a Negro fighter-pilot veteran of the Korean war, was not so lucky, died after his parachute failed to bloom properly.

When Actress Kim Stanley quit the cast of A Touch of the Poet, Eugene O'Neill's current Broadway hit (TIME, April 6), it was rumored that she was feuding with Broadway's First Lady Helen Hayes (Kim's mother in the play). Fed up with the lingering flap, Actress Hayes, in a letter last week to weekly Variety, said: "There were times, late in the run, when Kim would have tried the patience of a saint, with her striving for [an] opening-night level of performance--even on rainy Thursdays. But nothing will wipe out the shining memory of ... the all too rare thrill of working with a perfect actress."

After husking a torrid version of Lover, Come Back to Me, Secretarial Student Pat Williams, 18, went "numb" with astonishment upon hearing herself acclaimed. Winning the beauty derby over nine white finalists, the well-stacked (36-24 1/2-37) new Miss Sacramento, first Negro ever to wear the local crown, now aspires to the Miss California and Miss America titles.

Dining at Maxim's in Paris on her tenth wedding anniversary, high-strung Operatic Soprano Maria Callas, 35, made a pronouncement between helpings of selle d'agneau `a la Callas. Manhattan-born Singer Callas attributed most of her professional success to the offstage support of her Milan tycoon husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, 64: "When I met him I was the most ridiculous singer of Italy, and he, a wealthy industrialist who owned 20 building-material plants, said, 'You have the most beautiful voice in the world,' and--thanks to his tenacity, his persuasion and his constant help--I could overcome all the difficulties."

TV-Radio Performer-Impresario Arthur Godfrey, 55, signed into a Manhattan hospital, where surgeons will check up on a chest tumor. Discounting the "ivy growing in this old Irish ruin," Airman Godfrey gamely commented: "Even if the tumor is malignant, I think I've 'caught it in time--and I know people who've lived a long time with only one lung. I've flown one-engine before."

On their Roman holiday, Britain's Queen Mother Elizabeth and Princess Margaret saw Pope John XXIII in a 20-minute private audience. They conversed in French, but it was later reported that the jovial Pontiff told his royal visitors: "English is the next language I shall learn!" One afternoon, before getting elegant for a dinner party, Margaret ventured forth for cocktails with a new beau. Italians were quick to read budding romance into her frequent dates with tall, retiring Prince Henry of Hesse, 31, a Protestant and a scion of the Italian House of Savoy. Henry, a talented painter of surrealist landscapes, has had one-man exhibitions in London, Paris, and U.S. cities.

Proposed for a $20,000-a-year job as a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority by President Eisenhower: Arkansas' former Democratic Congressman Brooks Hays, 60, defeated last November in his bid for re-election by an eleventh-hour write-in vote of Little Rock school segregationists, hastily mobilized to squelch Moderate Hays and his gradualism.

A passel of Continental newspapers persisted in spreading rumors that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev must watch his intake or be subject to a precipitate outgo from this earth. U.S. "Astrologian" Carroll Righter, syndicated globally in some 250 U.S. newspapers, promptly confirmed it all by warning that Khrushchev's stars indicate a need for great vigilance over "his stomach and digestive tract."

Britain's enterprising Duke of Bedford, who last year turned over the greensward of his ancestral mansion to a pack of sun worshipers for an international nudists' frolic, announced that this year Woburn Abbey will angle for the sightseer trade (admission: 35-c- a head) without resorting to any sideshows besides a rally for helicopters and other aircraft, a horse show, a circus. "Nudism is played out," said His Grace summarily. "It was a good gimmick while it lasted."

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