The backdrop depicted the President's lush manor retreat in Virginia, and the prologue announced: "In this austere setting, we rejoice that never have so many reaped so much benefit from such large doses of misery." Thereupon, stage Democrats--including, of course, a regiment of simulated Kennedy relatives--rode to the hounds in pink riding jackets. It was the opening scene of the Washington Gridiron Club's annual political roast, and John F. Kennedy was present in person for the New Frontier's first ravaging by the press-corps parodists. While the catchy theme song was a doctored Good News (sample lyric: "Bad news! Everything's awful bad/ That's how we like it, bad news!"), there were other musical highlights, including a fast chorus--and count--by impersonators of Cook County Poll Watchers Jacob Arvey and Richard Daley, who warbled, to the tune of Tea for Two:

Two for you, and three for me

And here's a few ; they all are free

And counting fast, I see they're cast for

Jack.

But the bipartisan farce also opened such vistas as Ike's deluxe hobo jungle in Palm Springs, where a servant said, "He stopped over in Gettysburg just long enough to collect his soil conservation check," and the Capitol satirists duly noted that "Nelson Rockefeller is trying to rush through the 20th century before Barry Goldwater repeals it."

Turning a Homburg trick unique in U.S. history, David K. E. Bruce, former Ambassador to France and Germany, arrived in London to present his credentials to the Court of St. James's, became the first U.S. diplomat ever to hold the top three European ambassadorships. With him and no less practiced was Second Wife Evangeline Bell Bruce, a diplomat's daughter who grew up on four continents. While serving in Bonn two years ago, the multilingual mother of three, who was once cited as one of the "World's Ten Best-Dressed Women," earned a rare eulogy from another ambassador's lady: "Evangeline Bruce gives us all a complex. If only she were less intelligent, less attractive or less chic. It is impossible to compete with her."

Lying in a hospital oxygen tent in London, the city of pea-soup viruses, Cinemactress Elizabeth Taylor, 29, was suffering from double pneumonia so severe that one of her six doctors told Husband Eddie Fisher that she had only one hour to live. Throughout the week Liz's condition made huge headlines. But at week's end -- following an emergency tracheotomy, intravenous feeding through the ankle, blood transfusions, and the desperation use of a brand-new electric respirator -- Elizabeth Taylor, who had undergone more than a dozen previous hospitalizations, was pronounced on the mend.

Britain's bachelor Duke of Kent, 25, the first cousin of the Queen and eighth in succession to the throne, was an elusive catch. Commoner Katherine Worsley, 28, a descendant of Regicide Oliver Cromwell, seemed hardly a likely captor, yet for four years, the couple sporadically courted. A captain in the Royal Scots Guards, the Duke was a heavy-footed hot-rodder ("100 miles an hour suits me") who had waffled at least four assorted autos, a light-hearted playboy whose pranks had been questioned on the floor of Commons. While the toothy peer muddled and frolicked through Eton and Sandhurst, quiet Kate Worsley diligently attended day school, taught at Lady Eden's fashionable Kensington kindergarten. But then the shy, unspoiled schoolmarm retired to her Yorkshire home, gardened with her mother, stomped the moors of the 4,000-acre family estate with her father, Sir William Worsley, onetime team captain and now president of the county cricket club. And last week the Duke of Kent was all but stuck to the Worsley wicket: he proudly nipped up to Buckingham Palace with his new fiancee for a toast from the Queen to a June wedding.

Fearful that the upcoming trial of Adolf Eichmann might provoke a new era of anti-German feeling, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer held a rare press conference, expressed his concern. "We Germans," said he, "are apt to forget that part of our past which was anything but pleasant more quickly than people in the countries affected by it." A proxy statement from the stockholder-harassed Chrysler Corp., which just en joyed its first profitable year since 1957, mentioned a raise for Chairman-President Lester Lum Colbert, whose compensation totaled $260,650. Colbert's compact-era 1960 salary boost: $150.

Before a cheering A.F.L.-C.I.O. audience, Harry S. Truman expounded the novel theory that a weak President generally follows a great one. "As one of the great ones," clucked Harry, "I can make that statement," obviously hoping that everyone would forget that he was F.D.R.'s successor.

Harlem's Democratic Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, whose frenetic schedule sometimes even includes a House roll call, was occupied on other fronts last week. In Manhattan, he launched a $450,000 expansion project for his Abyssinian Baptist Church, threatened three collections per Sunday service until the crash campaign was completed. In the capital for a radio interview the same day. Preacher Powell, who has been indicted but never convicted in a still pending income-tax-evasion case, exuded brotherly love for Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa. Said the House Education and Labor Committee chairman: "Mr. Hoffa has completely vindicated himself before the courts. If he is as bad as he is supposed to be, then why isn't he in prison?"

On her social rounds last week, Reporter Elsa Maxwell buttonholed 61-year-old Divorce Adlai Stevenson, bluntly asked why he had never remarried. The U.N. Ambassador explained that it was because he could never understand women. "Must you understand a woman to marry her?" wondered Elsa. "Either that," confided Adlai, "or she must understand me. But do women ever understand?"

A jet-age anachronism, Senior Birdman Max Conrad, 58, still flies the featherweight flivvers of his youth, stocks his cockpit with a rhyming dictionary for versifying while aloft, has made 79 solo crossings of the Atlantic. Last week, the latter-day Lindbergh landed his Piper Aztec at Miami International Airport after logging a 25,457-mile trip around the world. His time--eight days. 18 hours, 49 minutes--chopped 20 days off the previous record for light piston craft.

On an inspection tour through the tall cane country outside Havana, Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro, 33, decided to limber up his strong arm, took over pitching chores in a sandlot baseball game, carelessly allowed a runner to steal second. The incensed pitcher imperiously motioned the man back to first, delivered the shortest oration of his reign. "In the revolution," cried Castro, "stealing is not permitted--even in baseball."

In a last hurrah for the late Boston politician John Francis Fitzgerald, Grandson John Fitzgerald Kennedy rechristened the 92-ft. presidential yacht Barbara Anne (named by Ike for his granddaughter) as the Honey Fitz.

Sprung from Manhattan's Neurological Institute after 23 days of hospitalization for "rest and a checkup" because of "emotional upset," Marilyn Monroe was well enough to attend the funeral of ex-Mother-in-Law Augusta Miller, sat teary-eyed next to former Husband Arthur Miller. Later in the week, Marilyn received a tribute of sorts from Carolina Israelite Editor Harry Golden. Nominating the cinemactress for his "Inter-faith Brotherhood Week Award of 1960," Golden reasoned: "Marilyn has married a Protestant, a Catholic and a Jew. in that order, and divorced all of them, impartially, with the proper amount of tears. That's what I call brotherhood."

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