Divorced. By Linda Darnell, 28, cinemactress (Forever Amber): Cameraman Peverell Marley, 49; after seven years of marriage, seven months of separation, one adopted child; in Los Angeles.

Died. Walter White, 69, who helped set off the sensational "monkey trial" of John T. Scopes in Dayton, Tenn. in 1925; of a heart attack; in Dayton. Superintendent of Schools White agreed with Scopes, high school biology teacher in Dayton, that the state's law against teaching evolution was absurd. To get it annulled, Scopes stood trial for teaching the doctrine, White swore out the warrant. As Lawyer Clarence Darrow (for evolution) and William Jennings Bryan (against it) argued, the issue of intellectual freedom v. bigotry caught the interest of the world. Scopes lost, was fined $100. The fine was remitted, but the law remains.

Died. Lloyd C. (for Cassel) Douglas. 73, novelist; of a heart ailment; in Los Angeles. At 52, Lutheran Minister Douglas began a fifth collection of essays which somehow wound up as a novel. Magnificent Obsession, a fictionalized tribute to good works, sold nearly 700,000 copies its first year. After a second bestseller (Forgive Us Our Trespasses), Douglas left the pulpit, concentrated on his "nationwide parish of novel readers," who deluged him with letters of thanks for the comfort they found in his eleven novels, including The Robe, The Big Fisherman. He was always frankly "more concerned with healing bruised spirits than winning the applause of critics"--who deplored his cliches, called his people puppets, his action melodrama. Novelist Douglas was even inclined to agree: "The characters are tiresomely decent, and everything turns out happily in the end ... I came into this business too late to take on any airs about it."

Died. Andre Gide, 81, man of letters; in Paris. Gide published his first book (a journal) at 21, waited long for recognition, longer for an audience, by the end had published 50-odd books: novels (The Immoralist, The Counterfeiters); criticism (Dostoevsky, Chopin); nonfiction ranging from a defense of the U.S.S.R. to an attack on it; and his lifelong Journals. In the '40s he finally won international recognition as one of the century's major writers; the Nobel Prize in 1947 made it official. He was "compelled," he said, to write about his own inner conflicts, "which otherwise would have fought constantly with each other": his Puritan boyhood v. the hedonism he discovered in North Africa; his homosexuality v. his love for his cousin and wife, Emmanuele; his emancipation from convention v. his search for a personal substitute; his artist's ego v. his social conscience. The conflicts showed in both his literary style and his personal appearance (he kept a Bible in the flowing cape he once affected).

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