On her first visit to Boston, Glamorous Grandma Marlene Dietrich, 56, wowed the Massachusetts legislature with a one-minute speech ("I have no business talking to such a group of important men"), took time off from rehearsals for her International Revue to talk about a book she is writing: Marlene Dietrich's ABC's. Under each letter of the alphabet, Marlene will write about subjects that concern her. "I'm going to put President Kennedy in the book under Y and not K," she said. "For youth, you know." But writing comes hard to Marlene. "I've talked to Hemingway and everybody who knows about this problem of getting down to writing," she said. "I make the same excuses as everybody else to avoid the issue. My best excuse is defrosting the refrigerator. That's a wonderful way to put off writing."

In a gossipy memoir in McCall's magazine, Dwight Eisenhower's former Cabinet Secretary Robert Gray revealed that the tart tongue of ex-Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams did not always spare even Ike himself. Adams, wrote Gray, was inclined to be particularly waspish over the President's habit of slipping away in the afternoons ("Good God, is he playing golf again?") and at occasional presidential demands for ultra-swift action ("What does he think I am, a goddam gazelle?").

Still erect and handsome, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur celebrated his 81st birthday in Manhattan as guest of honor at the 14th annual reunion of the senior officers of his World War II Southwest Pacific Area Command. The stag dinner, which is always held on MacArthur's birthday, is virtually his only public appearance. So successfully has the old soldier faded away that he never gives an interview, seldom leaves his Waldorf Towers hermitage, even to preside as board chairman at executive meetings of Sperry Rand Corp.

In Hollywood, after 17 years of retirement, onetime Movie Dancer Eleanor Powell, 48, donned top hat and tights to rehearse for a Las Vegas comeback. A bachelor girl since her divorce from Actor Glenn Ford more than a year ago, Eleanor was spurred into her new burst of high stepping by Son Peter Ford, 16. "He bet me I couldn't do it," she said. "He thinks I'm from the horse-and-buggy era."

On the fairways, Golfers Arnold Palmer, 31, and Sam Snead, 48, sometimes dazzle their fans as much with the hues of their working clothes as they do by their shot making. No less dapper but far more subdued, both showed up last week at the Metropolitan Golf Writers Association dinner in Manhattan in well-tailored dark business suits. But at another dinner in Rochester, Palmer (TIME Cover, May 2) picked up a gaudy accessory: the $10,000 diamond-studded Hickok Belt awarded him as the outstanding professional athlete of 1960.

In Manhattan, a tax appraisal of the estate of prolific Whodunit Author Mary Roberts Rinehart, who died in 1958, revealed that crime can indeed pay. Despite gifts over the years to charity and her family that totaled approximately $2,000,000, Mrs. Rinehart's net estate was $658,461, of which $38,400 was bequeathed to relatives and employees, the remainder to her three sons.

Garbed like an Eskimo and puffing on a cigarette, the Duchess of Kent, 54, anxiously watched the British army ski championships at St. Moritz, Switzerland. Reason for her visible dismay was the performance of the team captain of the Royal Scots Greys--her son, the Duke of Kent, 25. The duke fell twice in the downhill, each time losing a ski, was disqualified in the slalom. Straight-faced the London Daily Telegraph: "The duke was none the worse for his experience."

Seized by one of his periodic fits of yearning for a life of contemplation, India's normally bustling Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, 71, indiscreetly confided to a British newsman that it would be "best if I retired--best for me and best for India." So many cries of protest flooded into New Delhi from all over India that the wily Prime Minister was forced to correct the record: "There is no thought in my mind at present or in the foreseeable future of my retiring, so there need be no speculation about it."

Taking advantage of a Radio Moscow broadcast in honor of his 70th birthday, Russian Author Ilya Ehrenburg aimed an oblique swipe at his government's persistent but unadmitted discrimination against Jews. Said Ehrenburg: "I am proud of the fact that I am an ordinary Russian writer. But my passport [for travel inside Russia] states that I am not a Russian but a Jew. As long as even one anti-Semite exists in the world, I shall proudly reply to any question as to my nationality: 'I am a Jew.' "

Arriving in London as the sole American to join the West End version of last season's Broadway revue, A Thurber Carnival, Humorist James Thurber, 66, stated his canny reason for coming to Britain. "No one seems to die over here," said Thurber. "Every time they try to hold a memorial service, the corpse writes in to say he's feeling fine. In America, love after 40 is obscene, work after 50 is unlikely, and death before 60 is practically certain."

Leaning heavily on a silver-knobbed walking stick, Sir Winston Churchill, 86, clumped slowly into the House of Commons for the first time since he broke a bone in his back last November. Churchill's entrance was met with Commons' warmest welcoming growl of "Hear-hear-hear-hear," enthusiastically led by the member whose speech he had interrupted, Opposition Leader Hugh Gaitskell. Beaming, Sir Winston plumped himself down on the government front bench for half an hour, but in keeping with the self-imposed silence he has maintained in Parliament since his resignation as Prime Minister in 1955, he did not address the House.

From a lobster pot 116 feet deep in the waters off Jewell Island, Me. came a possible clue to the mystery disappearance of France's late Captain Charles Nungesser, who vanished somewhere over the Atlantic 34 years ago. Lodged in the pot was a fragment of an instrument panel, which may have come from Nungesser's ill-fated biplane, L'Oiseau Blanc. On May 8, 1927, the dashing Nungesser and his navigator, Franc,ois Coli, took off from Paris, aiming at the $25,000 Orteig Prize, which awaited the first man to fly nonstop between Paris and New York--and which was won by Charles Lindbergh for his solo flight twelve days later. The former French ace, who shot down 47 enemy aircraft in World War I and was wounded 17 times, was never seen again. Pending inspection of the instrument-panel fragment, French authorities remained skeptical that it came from L'Oiseau Blanc. But a former French flyer now living in Maine said that the rivet construction of the fragment indicated that it was from a plane of the same vintage.

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