Divorced. Phyllis Diller, 58, rubber-faced doyenne of domestic comedy; from her husband of ten years, Actor-Singer Warde Donovan, 59; in Los Angeles. Ms. Diller's courthouse exit line: "We have a great settlement. I got the house and I gave him the gate." - sb Died. Marguerite Perey, 65, pioneering research chemist; of cancer; in Paris. At 20, Perey began working as a laboratory assistant to Marie Curie at the French Radium Institute. In 1939 she isolated francium, the 87th element in the periodic table. Cancer, probably caused by her work with radioactive elements, had already afflicted her when she was elected as the first female corresponding member of the French Academy of Science in 1962. sb Died. Thomas McCahill, 68, popular automobile writer; of a heart attack; in Ormond Beach, Fla. In 1946 McCahill began basing his Mechanix Illustrated critiques of new models on his own road tests. Spiced with tart "McCahillisms" (he once compared a Jaguar's heating system to "an old lady breathing on your leg"), "Uncle Tom's" column had a wide following for almost three decades. sb Died. Bob Wills, 70, "Western Swing" bandleader-composer; of pneumonia; in Fort Worth. Wills turned out dance tunes that are now called country rock, introducing with his Texas Playboys such C & W classics as Take Me Back to Tulsa and New San Antonio Rose.

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Died. Jonathan Norton Leonard, 71, TIME'S Science editor from 1945 to 1965; of heart disease; in Manhattan. Leonard covered the development of the Abomb, the first nuclear reactor and the early discoveries of the space age. A man of wide-ranging curiosity, he was a biblical scholar as well as a Latin American specialist; he could describe quasars or the ways of night-flying squirrels with precision and clarity. Such books as Flight Into Space and Crusades of Chemistry made Leonard one of the nation's most respected science writers. sb Died. Clifford Durr, 76, Federal Communications commissioner and civil liberties lawyer; of a heart attack; in Wetumpka, Ala. On the FCC from 1941 to 1948, Durr lobbied for "public interest" channels, helping to make possible today's PBS-TV network. Later, in his native Alabama, Durr defended Mrs. Rosa Parks, a seamstress, whose 1955 arrest for violating Montgomery's bus segregation ordinance became a landmark in the struggle for integration. sb Died. Leroy "Buddy" McHugh, 84, legendary police reporter; of heart disease; in Chicago. Last survivor of the brash Chicago press corps depicted in The Front Page, McHugh used every ploy to scoop competitors: posing as a coroner to get privileged information, hiding behind police sergeants' desks and answering their phones. Though he reported some 700 murders, McHugh's greatest coup came in 1952 when he filed a series of interviews with an escaped swindler before persuading him to surrender to FBI officials in Milwaukee. sb Died. Ernst Alexanderson, 97, prolific inventor of over 320 electrical devices; in Schenectady, N.Y. Using a high-frequency alternator he developed at General Electric Co. labs, Alexanderson in 1906 made his first continuous-wave broadcast from a radio station in Brant Rock, Mass. The program featured a soprano, a violinist and a speech, startled wireless operators at sea, who had previously been able to receive only dots and dashes.

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