Engaged. Jackie Gleason, 59, corpulent comic (The Honeymooners and You're in the Picture) and composer-director; and Marilyn Taylor Horwich, fiftyish, onetime dancer and sister of Choreographer June Taylor; after a 27-year checkered romance.

Died. Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, 73, distinguished Oxford historian of Germany from the Kaiser through Hitler; in London. While living in Germany between World Wars, Wheeler-Bennett watched the rise of German chauvinism and the fall of the Weimar Republic, which he catalogued in Hindenburg, the Wooden Titan (1936). The book so aroused Nazi ire that it was banned in Germany in 1937. Sir John also examined the era in other works such as Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918-1945 and Munich: Prologue to Tragedy.

Died. Constance McLaughlin Green, 77, American social historian whose study Washington, Village and Capital, 1800-1878, detailed that city's growing pains, from sewage to schools, from politics to the struggles of the city's blacks, and won her the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for history; in Annapolis, Md.

Died. Thornton Wilder, 78, Olympian playwright and novelist whose timeless writings won him three Pulitzer Prizes; of a heart attack; in New Haven, Conn, (see THEATER).

Died. William Wellman, 79, tough, carousing Hollywood director-writer whose film Wings won the first Academy award presented for Best Picture in 1929; of leukemia; in Los Angeles. Bored with homework at his Brookline, Mass., high school, he devoted his afternoons to skating and stickhandling for the hockey team. But the ice was not fast enough and he turned to flying, training with the French Foreign Legion, then as a fighter ace with the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I. Wellman's wartime exploits so impressed Douglas Fairbanks Sr. that after the war the swashbuckling star extended Wellman an invitation to play a featured role in the film Knickerbocker Kangaroo. Wellman wasted no time deciding he "was frightful" as an actor and switched to directing. In 1920 he made his first firm, The Twins of Suffering Creek. Seven years later, directing Wings, Wellman got so involved in the production that he "all but gave up my principal occupations of the time ... wenching, boozing and brawling." Other Wellman classics included The Public Enemy (1931), A Star Is Born (1937), Nothing Sacred (1937), Beau Geste (1939), and perhaps his finest film, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943).

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