Divorced. Dean Martin, 55, boozy-voiced king of low-proof TV song and dance; and Jeanne Martin, 44; after 23 years of marriage (three of separation), three children; in Hollywood.

Died. James H. Nicholson, 56, co-founder and former president of American International Pictures, which during the '50s and '60s earned healthy profits and abusive reviews with such mindless, minibudgeted films for the adolescent drive-in set as I Was a Teenage Werewolf and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini; following surgery for a brain tumor; in Los Angeles.

Died. Eugene Berman, 73, Russian-born painter who led the neoromantic movement in Paris during the '20s but found his real forte three decades later as a designer of lush sets for New York's Metropolitan Opera (Rigoletto, The Barber of Seville, Don Giovanni) and the opera stages of Europe; in Rome.

Died. L.P. (for Leslie Poles) Hartley, 76, prolific English novelist whose poised, finely finished story of love between the social classes, The Go-Between, was last year made into a memorable movie; of heart and liver disease; in London.

Died. Rene Mayer, 77, ubiquitous Cabinet minister in the postwar governments of France and its Premier for four months in 1953; in Paris. A businessman (railroads) turned politician. Mayer fled to Algiers in 1943. As a member of the Radical Socialists in the postwar French Assembly, he proved himself a hard-headed technician capable of self-preservation during the Fourth Republic's era of musical-chair governments. In 1955, Mayer was named president of the European Coal and Steel Community, which eventually evolved into the Common Market.

Died. Mark Van Doren, 78, educator, author and poet; in Torrington, Conn. A lean, soft-spoken scholar, Van Doren launched his career as an educator at New York City's Columbia University in 1920. Though he wrote more than 50 books of verse, fiction and literary criticism and in 1940 won a Pulitzer Prize for his spare, Frostian lyrics (Collected Poems), the classroom remained his focal point for 39 years. Among the students influenced by his gentle Socratic discourses were Novelist Jack Kerouac and Poets Thomas Merton, Allen Ginsberg and John Berryman. Though stunned by the 1959 scandal involving his son Charles, who had been fed answers on the TV quiz show Twenty-One, Van Doren remained a near-legendary figure whose guidance was eagerly sought by Columbia's pupils and graduates.

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