Saving her lungs for such important tasks as upper-register squelching of impresarios, Diva Maria Callas ordered no candles for her 35th birthday cake, instead plopped on the pastry one tiny light bulb, at the climactical moment puckered up for a symbolic breath, simultaneously pressed a button that throttled the glow. Explained her dutiful husband, Industrialist Giovanni Meneghini: "She thinks it's more modern."

Becalmed between floors in a Chicago hotel elevator. New Jersey's Democratic Governor Robert B. Meyner displayed a true politician's talent for talking his way out of anything, tranquilized the panic-stricken operator with a soothing filibuster (25 minutes) until rescue time. "She'd never been faced with an emergency before, but after a few minutes she calmed down, and we just chatted until the power was 'resumed," explained Presidential Hopeful Meyner, adding carefully: "We did not discuss politics."

Stashing away one racket for another, rangy Negro Tennistar Althea Gibson began work on her first Hollywood role: a slave who ladles Southern comfort to her mistress when the boys ride off in old pro Director John Ford's Civil Warmup, The Horse Soldiers.

Setting a suggestively useful precedent for unhorsed Asian statesmen, ex-Premier U Nu of Burma, who recently turned over his governmental burdens to General Ne Win (TIME, Nov. 10), donned saffron robes, humbly appeared with shaven head for his ordination as a Buddhist priest in Rangoon.

Professedly unaware that his proposition was out of place, Italian Tailor Angelo Litrico, who has occasionally fitted the well-padded form of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, offered President Eisenhower a vicuna coat (free, no strings), later decided, after he was told about Bostonian Bernard Goldfine, that the offer was still good. "It is not insulting in Italy to present a vicuna coat," explained Litrico. "In Italy it is a good material."

A gathering of jewelers and curiosity seekers crowded into a San Francisco salesroom, relentlessly bid down a 105-piece collection of gems (estimated value: $250,000) to a paltry $50,000. Previous owner of the baubles: the late France., Heenan ("Peaches") Browning Willson, pudgy nymphet bride at 15 (in 1926) of oddball Moneyman Edward West ("Daddy") Browning, then 51, who six months after their splashy nuptials shed her animal-fancying Daddy in the decade's most untidy divorce.

Because of heavy medical bills during the last years of longtime Boston Pol James Michael Curley, his family announced, there was not enough left in the estate to carry out all his bequests of $48,000.

Charging "extreme cruelty," Cinemactress Debbie Reynolds filed suit for divorce from Crooner Eddie Fisher after three years, two months of another Hollywood "ideal marriage," asked for "reasonable and substantial support and maintenance" and custody of the two little Fishers, Carrie, 2, and Todd, nine months. Hours later, Eddie shared champagne and caviar at a Beverly Hills bistro with the cause of it all, Cinemactress Elizabeth Taylor ("I'm alive") Todd.

After dousing a Thursday night Carnegie Hall audience with his own resonant version of what it all meant, New York Philharmonic Conductor Leonard Bernstein grandly invited Composer Aaron Copland on stage to say a word or two about the piece at hand: Copland's Music for the Theatre, written in 1925. Although the crowd giggled and gasped, Leonine Lenny batted not one dramatic eye as brisk, balding Composer Copland playfully pinked the Sousaphone-sized Bernstein ego: "When I wrote Music for the Theatre, Leonard Bernstein was seven years old. I tell you this because as you listen to him conducting it, you may think he had a hand in writing it. He didn't. The notes are mine."

Paying token attention to nationwide outraged howls that Elder Statesman Sir Winston Churchill had been immortalized as a baggy, bullet-headed gorilla, a sponsoring committee from Churchill's constituency of Woodford agreed to accept a controversial new $14,000 statue of their Member hewed by Sculptor David McFall. Defending his 8 1/2-ft., two-ton carving, McFall argued, "I have attempted to portray Sir Winston as a man of intellect. I wasn't making a Toby jug, you know." From the prickly, art-conscious subject, who hasn't seen it, came no rumble of discontent--yet.

Sixty years after Teller William Sydney Porter was jugged for embezzling $854.08 from an Austin bank, the Texas Heritage Foundation asked the President for a posthumous pardon. Not only was the evidence against him heavily circumstantial, argued Foundation President Paul Wakefield, but Porter, who wrote under the name O. Henry, had "paid his debt to society by serving his time [three years], and more than repaid society in his matchless contributions to American literature."

For $2,225,000 cold cash, U.S. revenooers settled a whopping $5,550,000 unpaid income-tax claim against deeply upholstered Super Bookie Frank Erickson, who told a U.S. Senate Committee in 1950 that he did a $12.5 million a year business with an annual net of over $100,000. The U.S. returned $1,471,000 he had paid as evidence of good faith to keep penalties and interest from multiplying while his case was in court.

In Stockholm, King Gustaf VI Adolf and his Cabinet restored Swedish citizenship to Cinemactress Ingrid Bergman, who became an Italian national by her 1950 marriage to chubby, debt-attended Roberto Rossellini.

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