Visitors are always told to keep back from the cages, but Britain's Prince Philip was too curious to be cautious. He pressed up close to the bar for a good look at the orangutans during his visit to the London Zoo. At that precise moment, one of the apes--Napoleon by name--relieved himself in the direction of His Royal Highness. Later, at a luncheon for the Royal Zoological Society, Philip apologized for "any faint whiff of animal which might be emanating from my end of the room. We have just been visiting some orangutans," said he, "and one of them welcomed me by widdling all over me."

She's only 19. He turned 18 last September and is still a freshman in college. Little wonder that Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, the first Negro elected to the Senate since Reconstruction, was startled when his oldest daughter Remi broke the news that she plans to marry Donald Hasler, a white student at New Jersey's Monmouth College. "Daddy said, 'Oh, you're so young,' " recalled Remi. But the Senator soon came around, and plans are set for a June wedding at the family's summer place on Martha's Vineyard. Donald's folks were all cheers. Said his mother: "They're in love--and that's all that counts."

Politicians, like prizefighters, rarely retire by choice. Not so Lester B. Pearson, 71. Since he retired as Canada's Prime Minister last month, Pearson has declined an offer to teach full time at Yale, although he may give a series of lectures at Harvard next winter. He has settled into a small white cottage in suburban Ottawa, where he intends to spend his days savoring his wife's home cooking ("It's fantastic") and chasing down cobwebs. "We wanted a smallish house," he says, "so that I could do the housework."

"These Roman actors live very well," observed Jason Robards. "It was trie perfect party, and I just loved meeting Lauren Bacall," gushed Claudia Cardinale. "Gee, I don't remember if I went to a party or not," admitted Faye Dunaway, 27, who was in Rome for her latest film, The Lovers, and was the sight for all eyes at a bash given by Italian Actor Vittorio Gassman. "La Dolce Vita's dead," explained Gassman, "so I called it the 'California Roman Party' to honor the foreigners in town." From the sound of it, La Dolce Vita is alive and well in Rome. Partygoers boogalooed through the night, watched underground flicks, forked in vats of pasta, and things didn't wind up until next morning when the fathers at the next-door theological seminary complained that the racket was disturbing their Sunday services.

Johnny Carson got a big laugh on TV last year when he took Grant Wood's classic painting, American Gothic, and had a female torso in a flimsy bikini painted below the face of the dour-looking farm wife. Look magazine thought the gag so funny that it published a picture of Carson with his retouched painting; Playboy went even further and presented a topless version of American Gothic. But the humor of it all was somehow lost on Grant's sister, Nan Wood Graham, 68, who posed for the original painting 38 years ago and now lives in Riverside, Calif. "Who wouldn't be upset?" said she. "People think I posed for the terrible picture they made of it. I was ashamed to go to church for a month." She was so ashamed, in fact, that she filed a $9,000,000 defamation-of-character suit against Carson and NBC, Look and Playboy.

In her 44-year career, Contralto Marian Anderson, 66, had already won kudos from 25 U.S. universities. But the academic praise she got in New Orleans last week had a special significance. The doctorate of humane letters she was given at Tulane was her first from a Southern university, and the first awarded by Tulane to a Negro. "She has shared her incomparable gift with all the world," read the citation, "and is beloved for the range and timbre of her phenomenal voice, the scope of her repertoire, the warmth of her humanity, the breadth of her understanding, and the depth of her compassion." Said Contralto Anderson afterwards: "Your heart fills up."

Many an Old Yalie has been growling about the antiwar activities of William Sloane Coffin Jr., 43, Yale's chaplain since 1958, who is awaiting trial with Dr. Benjamin Spock and three others on charges of conspiring to help young men resist the draft. But on campus he's A-OK with the younger generation, and the Yale Corp. has given him an indefinite reappointment. Yale President Kingman Brewster did say, however, that "the corporation might want to review the appointment when the lawsuit is terminated if it seemed that the final judgment or factual basis for it had some bearing on the chaplain's fitness for his duties." Said Coffin: "If it's one year in the pokey, I'll respectfully request a sabbatical."

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