Old boxers never dive; they just fade away into legitimate businesses. Last week James Joseph ("Gene") Tunney, 62, world heavyweight champion from 1926 until he retired as an undefeated millionaire in 1928, was elected a director of Alleghany Corp., which is presumably strengthening its corner for a proxy fight with Texas' hard-swinging Murchison brothers (TIME, Oct. 3). In another corner, Rocky (Somebody Up There Likes Me) Graziano, 38, middleweight champion of a decade ago, was named president of a Long Island bowling center owned by New York's Acme Missiles & Construction Corp.

Apparently convinced that the French army will keep on trying to make a soldier of Yves Saint-Laurent for his full 27-month stint as a draftee, the House of Dior last week named his replacement as the world's most publicized fashion designer: Marc Bohan, 34, in charge of Dior's successful London operation in the past two years. In contrast to Saint-Laurent's extreme, erratic styles, Bohan--first married man and father ever to hold the lofty Dior post--is notable for designing clothes that consistently prove their wearers have bosoms and waists. The job is Bohan's until Saint-Laurent leaves the army, perhaps longer.

After going official rounds in Washington, including a state reception at the White House, Japan's Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko fell into a vacation mood and headed for Manhattan. From a City Hall welcome, Akihito, a noted ichthyophile, dashed a block away to a commercial aquarium-stock store, purchased some rare breeds of fish (imported to await his arrival) and arranged for them to be aboard his chartered plane when he flies back fo Tokyo this week. It was not on the crown prince's official schedule, but he was anxious to say hello to an old acquaintance, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, who lives in Manhattan's Waldorf Towers, only two floors away from the suite assigned to the royal couple.

Near the French Riviera town of Menton, a photographer approached a pretty, sex-hexed celebrity, and asked to take her picture. "Leave me in peace," was the reply. "I'm going to die anyway." A few hours later, Brigrrte Bardot made an apparently serious--and heavily headlined --attempt to die. In the garden of a friend's pink villa, a vineyard keeper found Brigitte unconscious beside a well. In the beam of his flashlight he saw Brigitte: "Her eyes were closed, her teeth slightly parted, and her arms were red with blood." It was her 26th birthday--and it ended up in a neurological clinic in Nice, where the diagnosis was barbiturate poisoning, plus slight wrist lacerations. Brigitte's periodically estranged husband, Cinemactor Jacques Charrier, far off on the other side of Southern France, in Biarritz, where he had gone after their latest spat, jumped in a car to drive to her side. At week's end the aging "Sex Kitten" of French moviedom was recovering. Paris' deadly serious Le Monde, customarily oblivious to BB, accorded her a sort of ghoulish obituary-in-life: "Once upon a time there was a starlet who saw happiness only in glory. She had glory beyond all expectations. Even her name vanished and remained only as two initials: BB. Glory devoured everything: private life, peace, human personality--real or imagined."

On their global good-will tour, Thailand's jazz-loving King Bhumibol and his charming Queen Sirikit arrived in Scandinavia, made an instant hit with the populace. A highlight of their visit was an escorted tour of the old theater in Sweden's summer palace in Drottningho'm. Their escort: Sweden's King Gustav VI Adolf, whose eyes sparkled a reflection of Sirikit's exotic beauty. In Rome last week, Sirikit wowed local newsmen, who all played eulogistic variations on the theme of "the most beautiful Queen in the world." No slouch in winning popularity for himself, Bhumibol got high marks for his jazz musicianship.

Britain's second Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, Richard Lloyd George, 71, inherited the title but little else from his famed father, lusty Welshman David Lloyd George, Britain's Liberal Prime Minister in World War I. Richard George ran away from it all at an advanced age, spent a decade in the U.S. as "a good workman doing, I hope, a number of different jobs well." He went home to England in 1958. In London's sporty Sunday The People, Dick George (as he was known to his U.S. acquaintances) began telling about father last week in a serialization of a forthcoming biography. His introduction to Papa was enough to stop Big Ben, bells, cogs and counterweights. Gist of it all: the P.M. was just as active in the boudoir as in Parliament. By Richard Lloyd George's count, his sire had 18 mistresses over almost 50 years, and by them had sired four illegitimate children-Observes the son: by the time Lloyd George got around to marrying at 25, he had already acquired "a slightly scandalous reputation as a philanderer."

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