Four weeks after the 35-ft. fall that killed two other members of the high wire's famed Flying Wallendas (TIME, Feb. 9), Survivor Mario Wallenda, 22, had recovered sufficiently to undergo two-and-a-half hours of surgery on his shattered spine. "His prognosis for life," announced the Highland Park (Mich.) General Hospital, "is good, but he is a paraplegic, and his chances of walking normally again are hopeless."

The pawns were human when World Chess Champion Mikhail Botvinnik took on the 1957 titleholder, Vassily Smyslov, in a "Peace Fund" benefit match that enthralled 15,000 Muscovites. So were the king, queen, and all the other pieces in the latest Marxist evolution of an ancient Oriental version of chess. But unlike the Eastern game--in which, according to legend, the chessmen were prisoners of war, and once taken, were beheaded--the Soviet game employed beauteous ballerinas and assorted other troupers, each of whom, upon being captured, put on a performance. So distracting, in fact, was the circus atmosphere (the show stopper: a satirical song that went, "Kings get five-room apartments Knights get single rooms And pawns get nothing at all") that peerless Grand Master Botvinnik could do no better than a draw.

Their matchless energy finally running low, Brother Plenipotentiary Bobby Kennedy and Hurricane Ethel blew into Washington's National Airport from the last leg of their four-week, 14-country world tour. Eagerly waiting at the field was their brood of seven, which had prepared a skit parodying the parental trip. But before the breathless kids could go onstage, the nation's business intervened again. "We're going to the White House," announced the Attorney General. Wondered his Washington-wise wife: "To get debriefed?"

Turning up at London's most merciless sacred-cow roast, Queen Elizabeth II chuckled her way through the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe with two other targets: Foreign Secretary Lord Home and Her Majesty's censorious Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Scarbrough. Though one member of the show's unholy quartet sourly reflected that "if we had wounded the Establishment as much as we intended, the Queen's advisers would not have let her come," a more mellow colleague took comfort in the fact that not a line had been cut from the hard-hitting script in deference to the Queen's presence. Said he: "We thought the best thing to do was to ignore her--in the politest possible way, of course."

What was planned to be a quiet, out-of-the-way wedding for Romano Mussolini, 34, jazz pianist son of II Duce, and Maria Scicolone, 23, curvy kid sister of Sophia Loren, turned into a tragicomic Roman holiday. With tumultuous thousands mobbing the tiny church at Predappio (where his father is buried), the bridegroom fainted dead away, but was revived by injection of a stimulant in time to weather the ceremony. The day came to an ill-starred conclusion when the chauffeur-driven Rolls of sister Sophia was involved in a collision that killed a local schoolteacher.

Whatever the New Frontier jet set in Palm Beach might think, on the playing fields of St. Petersburg there was only one Polish-produced Prince Stanislas--the St. Louis Cardinals' peerless pro, Stanley Frank Musial. Taking the first classic cut at the plate of his 21st major league season, the 41-year-old Stan the Man was as much a seasonal harbinger as the madrigal of the robin. After all, if wintergreen comes, can spring be far behind?

From a onetime prima donna who whirled giddily through the capitals of pre-World War I Europe and whose idolatrous fans gave the Metropolitan Opera its heady "Gerry-flapper" era came a sober lecture on the evils of living at too fast a pace. Said Dowager Soprano Geraldine Farrar in an 80th birthday interview: "So much is pressing in on humans today that they do not have time to stand still long enough to evaluate it. They gulp life and taste nothing. They eat life and have no savor."

"Obedience to a doctor is not one of the cardinal's virtues," observed Dr. Richard H. Wright of Boston's unstoppable Richard Cardinal Gushing, 66. But last week, after chivvying him into a hospital for a checkup after a stubborn case of flu, Dr. Wright succeeded in keeping His Eminence incarcerated for treatment of a newly diagnosed stomach ulcer.

Along with $170,000 in U.S. Steel stock and Oregon land holdings worth $2,438,000, the newly appraised estate of Autocrat of the Boardroom Table Sewell Avery proved to be gilt-edged by 113,640 shares of U.S. Gypsum (of which he became president at 31) and 123,100 shares of Montgomery Ward (where he stubbornly reigned until he was 82). It all amounted to $19,865,479--at least $5,000,000 more than Avery had been figured for--but more than half the estate would be bled off by the welfare state that he so memorably and implacably resisted.

Back in the golden days when he was still Prince of Wales, Britain's Duke of Windsor found himself "suddenly overwhelmed by an irresistible longing to immerse myself--if only momentarily--in the simple life of the western prairies," promptly indulged his fancy by buying a 4,000-acre spread in the Canadian province of Alberta. Last week, 43 years and five momentary immersions (longest: three weeks) later, the simplicity-seeking duke sold his dream place to Alberta Cattleman James Cartwright, 40. The purchase price, an estimated $190,000, carried with it one notable perk: perpetual rights to the use of the "EP" (for Eduardus Princeps) brand.

In the days before she outraged many of her Italian fans by emigrating to Canada, Cinemactress Gina Lollobrigida was almost as leary of cheesecake as of tax collectors, and in 1955 even sued the now defunct International News Service for what she considered an immodest depiction of her artistic credentials. But last week, back in Rome to make a frothy farce called The Beauty of Hippolita, Gina donned the blonde wig called for by the script and unabashedly Taylored her tactics to the competition.

After 64 years under the constraints of "neckties, shoelaces and cultivated conversation." Playwright Thornton Wilder decided to take a two-year sabbatical from civilization and "head out into that Arizona desert to be a bum." Wilder's timetable: "The first year, I'll give up the razor --and the second year, soap." The prospective site of his retreat: "Some place halfway between Nogales and Tucson --a place where I can hit the bars in both towns with equal ease. It will be a place where I'll pat little Mexican children on the head . . . a little white frame house with a rickety front porch where I can laze away in the shade in a straight-backed wooden rocking chair."

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