Irreverently telling her mother before she told it to Louella, Dancer Juliet Prowse, 25, phoned her South African home with "heartsore" news. Informed by Fiance Frank Sinatra, 46, that "there's millions of girls who'd give up work to marry me," the lissome cineminx had decided that she wasn't one of them. But there was consolation amid the wreckage of her six-week trial engagement. "You have to hand it to Juliet," confided a Sinatra intimate. "For all those weeks, there was never any other girl." Besides, the career that Juliet had declined to sacrifice on the altar of Frankie was looking appreciably more promising. Booked at a Las Vegas casino before the engagement for a scant $6,750 a week, she has just signed for a second Vegas appearance at $20,000 a week.

Less than 24 hours after he was sprung from jail on $100,000 bail, pending appeal of a 15-year tax-dodging rap, California Gambling Ganglord Mickey Cohen, 50, was accused of clobbering a Teamsters' picket with his own signboard. The donnybrook, which the short-fused mobster attributed to an anti-Semitic slur, was blamed by his foe on Cohen's unprovoked truculence (sample printable quote: "I own this local, and you are out"). This time Mickey only had to drop a niggling $1,050 bond to return to the suburban Van Nuys bungalow he shares with Showgirl Sandy Hagan, 22--an arrangement, Cohen assures his stirred-up bourgeois neighbors, that "has been okayed by her parents and my parents."

Looking for easy laughs, several score men of Harvard crowded into a Cambridge common room to listen to a lecture on "The Actor and the Modern Theater" by a speaker who had never finished high school. But after hearing her modestly ponder everything from her own Hollywood career ("I was not happy being a blonde bombshell and all that jazz") to modern psychological drama ("Maybe the unnatural things in life are the only safe ones to write about these days"), the Harvards gave Actress Shelley Winters, 39, a standing ovation. Shelley's reaction: "One of the proudest achievements of my life. I'll brag about it."

Winging into St. Petersburg with parasol at the ready, Major Stockholder Joan Whitney Payson joined Manager Charles Dillon Stengel for baseball's least auspicious event of the week: the launching of the National League's fledgling New York Mets. Asked if he thought he could alchemize a champion from the best dross that Whitney money could buy, Casey instinctively retorted: "I expect to win every day." Then, from the most voluble player in the league came an uncharacteristic halt in the Mach 2 verbiage. "Maybe," sighed Casey, "I'll be shell-shocked."

Though the estate of high-living Comedian Ernie Kovacs proved to be heavily encumbered by debts (among them: $250,000 in U.S. tax liens), his widow, Actress Edie Adams, refused to regard herself as a charity case. When a group of show business luminaries led by Milton Berle rallied to stage a fund-raising TV series for her benefit, Edie declined, explaining that "it would have embarrassed Ernie, and besides, there are so many worth while things that really need help." To support their three daughters, the pert comedienne proposed to rely on her own endeavors, which currently include a lucrative contract to film commercials for cigars -- which Chain Smoker Kovacs burned up at the rate of $40 a day.

In sickness and in health, Marilyn Monroe, 35, has always found ex-Second Husband Joe DiMaggio, 47, tall, dark and handy. Last week, visiting him for the second straight year at the winter encampment of the New York Yankees, she discreetly stayed out of view in the DiMag menage at Fort Lauderdale's Yankee Clipper Hotel for two days before Batting Tutor Joe cut practice to put her on a plane in Miami, wound up all the way from centerfield for a goodbye buss. Fetching up next in Mexico City, Marilyn scoffed at rumors that she might remarry DiMaggio ("We tried it once"), but admitted that "I'm keeping my eyes open." Then, buttonholed about the deep-water ordeal (TIME, Feb. 16) of Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn indicated one matter on which her eyes were wide-screen open. "I'd never," sniffed she, "let myself get lost on a desert island with a publicity man."

Wending his nomadic way home from the U.S. via Spain, Saudi Arabia's King Saud, 60, descended on Malaga in his Boeing 720 and took over the sumptuous Castillo Santa Catalina. His fortnight's rental (including a bed custom-made to his outsized dimensions) came to $10,000, but after two days, Saud restlessly roared off to Torremolinos. Although His Majesty had neglected to pay the bill, the Castillo's proprietors remained unruffled. Saud, it was understood, had arrived in Spain with a $340,000 bank draft and --for walking-around money--traveler's checks totaling $1,000,000.

In an interview with TV's David Brinkley, James B. Donovan, 46, pooh-poohed outcries that he had done the Kremlin a favor by helping engineer the exchange of Spymaster Rudolf Abel for U-2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers. "The only information Abel could communicate to Moscow now," insisted the Manhattan lawyer, "would be descriptions of life in the penitentiary in Atlanta." Donovan doubted, too, that the Russians would reassign Abel to espionage duty. Said he: "There would always remain the lingering suspicion--especially in a semi-Oriental mind --that he had made some private deal with me to become a double agent."

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