"When you get older, you get more ambitious," bubbled evergreen Schmalz King Rudolph Friml, who at 81 still takes a daily dip in the chilly Pacific, follows it up with five minutes of handstands and six hours at the piano. Convinced that "everyone is tired of unmelodious music," Friml hopes that his first new operetta since 1934, a "real Frenchie" confection called Rendezvous in Paris, will tinkle onto Broadway during the coming season.

From his hermitage in Cornish, N.H., publicity-proscribing Author J. D. (The Catcher in the Rye) Salinger, 42, proclaimed a new declaration of independence. "It is my rather subversive opinion," he wrote for the dustjacket of his forthcoming book, Franny and Zooey, "that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years." With customary obliqueness, Salinger pointedly failed to state what he considered a writer's most valuable property, proceeded to brush off the usual biographical data with the uncandid note: "My wife has asked me to add, however, in a single explosion of candor, that I live in Westport with my dog."

Up to the library of Milwaukee's Marquette University lumbered a truck from Washington, bearing about one-quarter of a weighty new gift: the personal and public papers of a 1935 alumnus, the late Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Donated to the university by the Senator's widow and ex-research assistant. Jean Kerr McCarthy (soon to become the wife of Civil Aeronautics Board Member G. Joseph Minetti), the first shipment of 30 packing cases contained mostly press notices of the Senator's storm-tossed career. But the remaining material, with its dossiers on his betes rouges, would undoubtedly be more incendiary--and possibly libelous. Said an official of the Jesuit university, who assumed that Mrs. McCarthy was screening the files before she packed them: "I'm sure she's using her head."

While Cuba's cultural commissars pondered converting Ernest Hemingway's 13-acre Finca Vigia into a museum, his widow, Mary Welsh Hemingway, was more concerned about his literary monument. Spending what may be her last weeks at their longtime Cuban home, Mrs. Hemingway, as per her husband's request, destroyed personal papers, culled his "hundreds of thousands of typewritten pages" for marginal notes like "burn this" or "this is pretty good" as a guide to what to publish and what to let perish. Among the manuscripts that Mary Hemingway may or may not ever release: The Dangerous Summer, a chronicle of the 1959 Spanish bullfighting season excerpted last year in LIFE; recollections of the literary denizens of 1920s Paris; and a novel described by Hemingway himself as "a big one all about the land, the sea and the air."

It was family reunion time for the Dwight D. Eisenhowers. While Ike and his three brothers got away from it all at a lodge near Watersmeet in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (reported the ex-President: "Fishing has been very fine and my golf very bad"), Mamie and her sister, Mrs. G. Gordon Moore, sadly met at the East Denver home where they grew up and where their mother died last September. While pondering the sale of the house, the sisters packed off many of its furnishings to Goodwill Industries, only to hastily retrieve a couple of items (including their mother's hand-carved rocker) after the Colorado Historical Society decided to add a Doud family room to its State Museum.

"We have gotten all we could possibly get from Joe Louis and still leave him with some hope that he can live," declared an Internal Revenue official last year. But last week the once peerless puncher, currently shuffling through a semi-soft-shoe act in a Detroit cabaret revue, was conscientiously dickering to kick back half his salary (reportedly $1,000 a week) as part payment on his 1946-52 tax arrears of more than $1,250,000. "I owe it. It was my fault," insisted the Brown Bomber. "And with all this Berlin stuff and getting a man to the moon, they gonna need the money."

At Chicago's Olympia Fields Country Club, the Golf Writers Association of America trotted out the new Walter Hagen Trophy, which is to be awarded yearly for "distinguished contribution to the furtherance of Anglo-American golf" in the name of the longtime lion of the links who first won respectability for the once sub-pariah professional. When the selection committee finally chose the award's first winner, it turned out to be Hagen himself, now 68 and an executive of the Wilson Sporting Goods Co.

With an ignominious "L" (for learner) adjoining its New Jersey license plates, a beige, cruiser-sized 1960 Cadillac painfully navigated the narrow lanes of ancient Sevenoaks, Kent, 20 miles from London. At the helm having a go at the British driver's test: the richest American, Oilman J. Paul Getty, 68, a 50-year road veteran who had let his U.S. license expire. After successfully wheeling through the test despite the handicap of his outsized chariot, the thriftiest of billionaires solemnly explained: "I drove this because it's the only car I've got."

Facing up to the horrendous choice between New York City's three Democratic candidates for mayor, the Pied Piper of Harlem, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, bestowed his anxiously awaited blessing on Organization Man Arthur Levitt. "New York City," prophesied the apocalyptic Adam, "is absolutely finished if affable, personable, charming, likeable, ineffective, weak Bob Wagner is returned to office."

Old Notre Dame Football Coach Frank Leahy, 52, saw his Colorado oil bubble burst into the news again when the Securities and Exchange Commission, winding up a two-year probe of Hamilton Oil & Gas Corp., charged Leahy with making "misleading" statements in the peddling of $230,000 of the company's now nearly worthless stock. Responded former Hamilton Vice President Leahy, who suffered a business-induced nervous breakdown last year: "I feel that the SEC knows that I am guilty only of overenthusiasm and lack of experience. If it is God's last act on earth for me, I'll repay all the friends and relatives who bought stock on my personal recommendation."

After protecting Presidents and their families from summit conferences to swimming pools and from the blood-stained steps of Blair House to the fox hunting fields of Middleburg, U. E. (for Urbanus Edmond) Baughman wanted out. Confessed the lanky, brush-haired veteran of 33 years in the Secret Service, the last 13 as its chief: "At 56 I'm worn out." Baughman's post-retirement plans: "I'm going to do all the things I've been watching other people do."

For the fifth weekend in a row, the President helicoptered into the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport, but this time with a surprise present for a special occasion: Jacqueline Kennedy's 32nd birthday. Labeling the gift a "private matter," White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger was equally reticent about the ensuing family celebration. When buttonholed on whether the birthday cake was bought or donated, Salinger--still slightly burned by the fallout over Jackie's last major social function, at Mount Vernon--smoothly replied: "It was baked."

Rocketing into the In box of Britain's unflappable Prime Minister Harold Macmillan came a dispatch reporting foreign concern over the adulation showered on Red Spaceman Yuri Gagarin during his recent visit to Britain. In no time at all the dispatch rocketed out again bearing a sardonic notation by the leader of the world's most zoophilous nation. "It was nothing," scratched Mac the Knife, "to what that little dog would have got."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.