The 1959 debut of Charlotte Ford, older daughter of Henry Ford II, has often been called "the party of the century." But last week, after the motor company board chairman laid on another successful gala, the title was in doubt. The latest refulgent debutante: Charlotte's sister, Anne Ford, 18. Paris Decorator Jacques Frank spent more than a year turning the Fords' Grosse Pointe Farms estate into a Versailles-like setting for the familiar blueblood-boiling beat of Bandleader Meyer Davis. And not even an hours-long downpour--which soaked through the turquoise-colored roof of the vast pavilion and kept a mop-and-bucket brigade of 70 swabbing through the night --could douse the enthusiasm of the stag line, as Anne's photograph album of her coming-out will forever record.

"Where I come from," sighed Blues Singer Ethel Waters to a Los Angeles reporter, "people never got close enough to money to get up a working acquaintance with it, so I didn't know how to keep it." In Pasadena, where she is living with friends, the 60-year-old ex-songstress-actress and co-author of the bestselling autobiography. His Eye Is on the Sparrow, admitted that she was dead broke, ill with a heart condition, yet never happier. "I'm not afraid to die, honey," said she. "In fact, I'm kinda looking forward to it; I know the Lord has his arms wrapped around this big fat sparrow."

Believed to be privately unsympathetic toward her son Fidel's Cuban revolution, Lina Ruz de Castro stirred inevitable rumors of defection when she flew out of Havana bound for Mexico City. But upon landing at Central Airport, she loyally respun her long-playing public apologia for the new "socialism"--"Everything is fine; we are enchanted"--and explained the prosaic purpose of her trip: Daughter Emma, wife of Mexican Engineer Victor Lomeli Delgado, is expecting a first child.

In Los Angeles' Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where she is being treated for osteomyelitis, ex-Cinemactress Marion Davies, 61, tumbled to the floor and broke her left leg. The accident caused long-distance concern to a longtime acquaintance, Joseph P. Kennedy, who has sent three specialists from the East to the Davies bedside during the past month.

In Chicago to harangue the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P., Harlem's Democratic Congressman Adam Clayton Powell urged the ouster of A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany on an unexpected charge: absenteeism. Noting that Meany refused to "tear himself away from the Florida sunshine to testify on the important minimum-wage bill," Powell, who usually plays his own hooky in Puerto Rico, evaluated the onetime Bronx plumber as "stupid" and "absolutely zero as a lobbyist and leader."

Washington's Republican Congressman Jack Westland, 56, who left the hustings during his first successful House campaign in 1952 to win the National Amateur Golf Championship, was named captain of the U.S. Walker Cup team, which will battle Britain in September. Although the five-term Representative still gets around Burning Tree and the Congressional Country Club links in the early 70s, he only finds time for golf on weekends, and his new post is strictly a non-playing proposition.

While laying out what he has cheerfully admitted will be "the greatest international exposition in history," Robert Moses, bluff president of the 1964-65 New York World's Fair Corp., did not hesitate to fault a predecessor. "Many people--some of them well-meaning--suggested we set some sort of classic pattern for the exhibit's architecture," said he, "but we decided not to trap our exhibitors in a maze of conformity. The 1893 Chicago fair, which held strictly to a Greek and Roman mold, set American architecture back 50 years."

Although royal prerogative has relieved her of official duties during her pregnancy, Britain's Princess Margaret, 30, has no intention of undergoing a solitary pre-confinement. Back in London after at tending the Yorkshire wedding of her cousin, the Duke of Kent, she accompanied Husband Antony Armstrong-Jones to the opening of the Leningrad Kirov Opera Ballet Company, happily joined the packed Covent Garden house in its energetic, foot-stomping applause. After the performance, they bolted from their seats in the stalls to a party with the dancers in the hall's well-named Crush Bar, then continued the marathon whirl at a candlelit coming-out ball given by Hungarian-born Textile Manufacturer Miki Sekers, finally got back to Kensington Palace just before dawn.

Hagerstown, Md., which shamed the nation in March when the local Howard Johnson restaurant refused to serve Dr. William Fitzjohn, then charge d'affaires from Sierra Leone, mended its offenses last week. After inviting the visitor back to town (just before his departure to become High Commissioner to the Court of St. James's), Mayor Winslow F. Burhans met the police-escorted motorcade at the city limits, later honored the colorfully draped Fitzjohn at a banquet attended by 200 of Hagerstown's most prominent citizens, including 30 Negro couples. Also gracing the town's first mixed social event in memory: a hand-sewn Sierra Leone flag quickly Rossed together by the mayor's wife--an appropriate gesture in an area just 25 miles from Frederick, Md., where Stonewall Jackson spared the old grey head of Flag Waver Barbara Frietchie.

Picked up for $50 by a suburban Chicago manuscript collector last week: a November 1942 letter from General Dwight D. Eisenhower to his son John, then a West Point underclassman. "This is a fine command," wrote Ike of the Allied troops he was about to lead into North Africa. ''And, of course, it is every soldier's ambition to get command of something, even if it is only a platoon. I never once dreamed that my first command would be an 'Allied' one and that I would have soldiers, sailors and airmen of two great countries under my control. I must say that it keeps a fellow stepping pretty rapidly to keep on top of the ball, but I try to keep my sense of humor and my feet on the ground.''

Just four days after his nimble-footed defection from Leningrad's Kirov Opera Ballet Company at Le Bourget Airport in Paris (TIME, June 23), Dancer Rudolf Nureev, 23, got a job with France's prestigious Marquis de Cuevas troupe. Starting salary of capitalism's newest convert: $6,000 a month.

Sprung 18 months early for good behavior during a five-year stretch for income tax evasion. Racketeer Frank Costello, 70, left federal custody in downtown Manhattan, headed north to Riker's Island workhouse to finish a 30-day New York sentence for contempt of court. When freed on this final rap, the old bootlegger, whose take from assorted enterprises once approximated $4,000,000 a year, plans to return to his Sands Point. L.I., estate "to tend my roses." But the U.S. Justice Department has other ideas. It hopes to send the now denaturalized immigrant on a longer journey--back to his Italian birthplace.

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