George Bernard Shaw had protested at first that he was too senile to write a new play after 90. Then someone told him that Sophocles had turned just that trick. Last week, Buoyant Billions, "A Comedy of No Manners," 93-year-old Shaw's first new play in nearly a decade, opened at Britain's Malvern Festival. Said the inevitable preface: "This is ... the best play I can do in my dotage. It is only a prefacette to a comedietta. Forgive it." The critics noted much to forgive: little plot, less point and many an idea that an appreciative Shaw had lifted from such earlier works of his favorite playwright as Back to Methuselah and You Never Can Tell. Somehow, though, critics and audiences agreed, the play had a familiar Shavian virtue as well: none of it was ever dull.

At 63, famed Mexican Painter Diego Rivera decided that it was time to divorce Painter Frida Kahlo, 39, his third wife, for the second time.

For her 70th birthday, after half a century of progress from ingenue to grande dame, Actress Ethel Barrymore received scores of greetings on a worldwide radio broadcast. Among the greeters: Harry S. Truman, Bing Crosby (who sang "Happy Birthday"), Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Bernard Baruch, Somerset Maugham.

At 85, Philosopher George Santayana revealed a sudden interest in a new subject: modern U.S. and English poetry. "I am starting with T.S. Eliot's Four Quarlets," he told an interviewer for the New York Times in Rome. Santayana thought that many passages were beautiful, but confessed that much of the stuff he just could not understand.

The cinema's Cecil B. DeMille, 68, an old hand at spectacle, felt up to learning some new tricks. He was on the road with the circus for three weeks to pick up a few pointers for a new movie about the greatest show on earth. Among his instructors : famed Clown Emmett Kelly, Aerialist Ruth Nelson.

Change of Pace

London's tailors, who know very well that one wears a turndown collar with a double-breasted dinner jacket, blinked at the sight of the seagoing Duke of Edinburgh in a high-winged collar, which is good form for Royal Navy evening dress. Speculated one of them: "It would probably start something if one could get the collars. It's the collar men who have got to jump to it now."

In Fort William, Ont., touring Gypsy Rose Lee, who makes a good thing of baring herself to the winds of fortune, suffered from overexposure. She tried out her new trailer bathtub near breezy Lake Superior, went to the hospital with a bad chill.

Soprano Lily Rons could beam in the Italian sun with Gobi, one of her three Tibetan terriers. When the snooty Hotel du Cap at Antibes would not make her pets welcome, Lily had flounced off to the Italian spa at Monte-catini. There her considerate hosts not only gave the dogs bed & board, but arranged to have them enter the Florence international dog show, where they naturally won a first prize.

Continent-shuttling Actress Gertrude Lawrence bade her London chauffeur goodbye, was off again to the U.S., busying herself en route with a theatrical benevolence: knitting mittens for George Bernard Shaw.

Back from a tour of dollar-famished Latin America, Rumba Maestro Xavier Cugat found it necessary to add up his earnings in frozen pesos, Brazilian coffee and Montevideo real estate. Then he signed up for a tour of dollar-starved Spain. The payoff this time: olive oil.

Thoughts & Afterthoughts

Adder-tongued Harold L. Ickes bared his well-worn fangs at the appointment of Attorney General Tom C. Clark to the Supreme Court. For the elevation of a "political hack," growled Ickes in the New Republic, "... the Court ought to order the President to show cause why he should not be held in contempt."

Novelist-Pamphleteer Upton Sinclair performed a post-mortem for the Saturday Review of Literature on his ten-volume series of Lanny Budd books and how they grew: "I fondly imagined that it was going to be one volume; of course when I got into it I realized that there might have to be a sequel, but it wasn't until I had written several volumes that I realized there might be several more."

In Pittsburgh, Conductor Artur Rodzinski, now freelancing, breathed his relief at giving up permanent assignments with orchestras. "It is true," he admitted, "I did do a beautiful job in building up the orchestras, but I'm afraid it wore on my conscience. Every place I went, I had to clean house and fire old musicians who were fathers of children."

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