When the story came out last spring (TIME, June 11), Actor Peter Lawford, 42, steamed that it was news to him. It just wasn't true, explained Peter, that he and Patricia Kennedy Lawford, 41, had decided on a legal separation after eleven years of marriage. The only split was "geographical," he said, "since my work in movies is in Hollywood" and Pat remained in Manhattan to look after their four children. Now the geography has changed. In Manhattan, Peter's lawyer announced an "amicable separation," and since Pat was in Sun Valley, Idaho, for the skiing, friends thought she might just stay there for six weeks and get the divorce.

Chef Rene Verdon quit the White House kitchen rumbling that California wines are tres ordinaires and Lyndon's favorite dishes are fit only for Him. That was too much for California-born Restaurateur Victor Bergeron, 63, better known as Trader Vic for his string of 13 Polynesian eateries around the U.S. He forked over $3,612 to buy a full page in San Francisco's Examiner & Chronicle to baste Rene in an open letter. A sampling: "By what stretch of the imagination do you think that French cooking is the only cuisine in the world? It happens that a great many people throughout the country enjoy beets with vinegar sauce. It's about time you Frenchmen start to look around."

Sometimes he certainly acted crazy. Like the day he stood talking earnestly to an oak tree, which he mistook for the King of Prussia. Or during the last years before his death in 1820, when he was shut up in Windsor Castle telling stories, laughing and crying, with a kingdom full of imaginary friends. Besides, he had acted pretty irrationally toward his American colonies. So, on evidence, historians have always believed that Britain's King George III was insane. Now two London psychiatrists have gone back over the medical records, including some still unpublished, and concluded that the historians are nuts. Dr. Richard Hunter and his mother, Dr. Ida Macalpine, wrote in the British Medical Journal that George was obviously suffering from "acute, intermittent porphyria," a rare liver disease that upset the royal nervous system and made the king delirious.

By the end of the twelve-day Viet Nam tour, Actress Carroll Baker, 34, was feeling positively unfrocked. First she lost three suitcases with $7,000 worth of Lanvin gowns inside. After the show with Bob Hope at Chu Lai, the troops admired her $8,000 feathered and beaded Balmain so much that finally one G.I. came up, said Carroll, and murmured, " 'Gee, how about just one of those feathers?' I said O.K., and that started it." The boys "deplumed" her. Since the $7,000 Edith Head number "just disintegrated in the heat, mud and rain," the poor child didn't have a thing to wear coming home to Hollywood. Except, of course, some fatigues that marines donated, along with battle patches, flyers' wings, and four bright stars from General William Westmoreland, the Man of the Year.

For a change someone was snapping his picture, and Master Photographer Edward Steichen, 86, was grinning "cheese" through his whiskers. He'd just been made a Commandeur de l'Ordre de Merite of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where he was born. After Luxembourg's Ambassador to the United Nations, Pierre Wurth, presented the order's cross in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, Steichen reported that he'll be starting off on a new photographic collection, something like 1955's magnificent "Family of Man." Only now, he chuckled, "it's about Woman, the greatest undeveloped resource today."

"I remember one problem," winced the Greatest. "There are twelve bushels of apples. They cost $10 each. You buy them, but before you do, you take a third of the apples out of each bushel. How much do you pay for the apples?" That one floored Heavyweight Cassius Clay, 23, and after he'd taken the count on two Army aptitude tests, the U.S. declared that the champion just wasn't bright enough to fight. Now Colonel Everette Stephenson, director of Selective Service in Kentucky, will "more than likely" summon Clay for another round of brain crushers. Meantime the champ won another kind of split decision. He got a Miami divorce from his wife Sonji because her slacks were too tight and her makeup too much for his Muslim eye, but was ordered to pay $1,200 a month in alimony for ten years and $22,500 in lawyers' fees. All of which added point to Cassius' remark: "I just said I was the greatest, not the smartest."

A bad notice is better than no notice at all, and so the folks in Sauk Centre, Minn., decided to keep right on making the best of that bad review native son Sinclair Lewis gave them 45 years ago. To prove that the place was never the philistine hotbed that the late author pictured in Main Street, the fictional "Gopher Prairie" celebrated Lewis' 75th birthday five years ago and started calling Main Street "the Original Main Street." Now they're heaping more coals of praise on old Red's head by raising $25,000 through the Sinclair Lewis Foundation to buy his two-story boyhood home and restore it to look the way it did when he was there.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.