Taking a mineral water cure for "liver insufficiency," the Shah of Iran, 44, daily commuted the 25 miles from Florence to the Montecatini spa in his Mercedes or new grey Ferrari 330 coupe, hitting speeds of up to 130 m.p.h. The Shah's liver perked up after a fortnight, and his wife, Farah Diba, 25, came on down from Innsbruck, where she had been skiing since the Olympics. Then they tooled into Rome where Fair Farah and the monarch, who had been working so hard at his land-and government-reform programs that his doctors had ordered a vacation, settled into the Iranian embassy for a four-day stay before flying home after an absence of four weeks.

Proper it was. "Dr. and Mrs. Eldridge Henry Wolff of Cambridge, Maryland, announce the engagement of their daughter, Miss Louise Eldridge Wolff, to Mr. Lincoln Gill Clark, son of Mrs. Vanderbilt Clark and Mr. Morton Gill Clark of New York." And proper it should have been, since the prospective groom's mother is undisputed Etiqueen Amy Vanderbilt, 55. The bride's parents followed her every instruction. The listing of the Clarks separately was a discreet indication they are divorced, and since Amy is "a newsworthy person," there was all sorts of genealogy tracing her son back to a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The Wolffs even accepted the Vanderbilt tip to release the news on Monday, "a slow news day." That was all in Chapter 3.

London's Daily Mirror was agape. Titling him the "Duke of Savvy," the tabloid editorialized: "This man Philip is talking horse sense." The speech at the Foreign Press Association was straight from the horse's mouth anyway, since the monarchy got most of the royal husband's attention. "It has to be all things to all persons," he confessed. "Of course, it cannot do this when it comes to being all things to traditionalists and iconoclasts. But if you are very cunning you get as far away from extremists as you possibly can because they kick harder." He also had something to say about Beatlemania: "I really could not care less how much noise people make singing and dancing. The noise I object to is people righting and stealing. It seems to me that these blokes are helping people to enjoy themselves, and that is far better than the other thing."

...

You put your left foot in. You put your left foot out. And you better do it fast, because that's not the hokey-pokey. It's the tinikling, and your toes will be squashed if you don't get them out in a big hurry. The tinikling is a Philippine dance, and the object is to see what deft steps you can pull off while hopping in and out between the two rhythmically clapping bamboo poles. So while he was over at the Philippine embassy in Washington to accept an award, Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver, 48, gamely shed shoes and tried his foot at it. He even managed a smile when a spectator sport heckled: "Go under it, man! Limbo!"

Professional photographers were yelling their heads off about who would be the one pool man allowed to shoot pictures for everybody. All right, snapped an amateur photographer, I'll do it. And since he was also a Maharajah, that settled things indeed. So Sikkim's Palden Thondup Namgyal, 40, did an Antony Armstrong-Jones, took the first picture of his wife, former Manhattanite Hope Cooke, 23, with their week-old son. Hope's son has no claim to the throne (the Maharajah's two sons by an earlier marriage will take care of that), but he got a consolation prize. The Dalai Lama is personally selecting his name.

...

Since he couldn't take it with him, Auto Millionheir Horace Dodge did the next best thing. He balled up his $2,500,000 estate so completely that everybody involved will be grey before getting a penny. Next to spending money, Dodge's favorite pastime seems to have been writing wills and codicils (at least eleven), and for a finishing touch he provided that the last one would be void if his mother outlived him. Naturally she did, and then led the charge of the litigant brigade. Though Mama is worth $65 million herself, she misses the $10,441,289.42 that she says he borrowed. Muttered his harried lawyer, Douglas Leo Paterson: "I'll bet he's up there now laughing at me. He said he'd make just as much trouble for me after he was gone as he did alive."

...

Ill lay: Herbert Hoover, 89, at his Waldorf Towers apartment in Manhattan, rallying after a bleeding right kidney and a respiratory infection caused the second serious setback to his failing health in eight months; Earl Mountbatten, 63, Chief of the British Defense staff, in London's King Edward VIIs Hospital for Officers, after an operation for a hernia; Sportscaster Red Barber, 56, in Emporia, Va.'s Greensville Memorial Hospital, with a mild heart attack; Historian George Kennan, 60, in Princeton Hospital with hepatitis; John Glenn, 42, in Columbus' Grant Hospital with a "mild" concussion after he fell in his bathroom, while trying to fix a loose cabinet, and struck the back of his head on the tub.

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