Music Lovers

Rumors about wife No. 4

Was it the marriage of the year or a crude political hoax? Belgrade was buzzing with rumors last week after stories appeared in the Western press reporting that Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, 86, had married Gertrude Minutic, an opera singer 51 years his junior. According to the unconfirmed reports, which surfaced while Tito was on a "mission of peace to the Middle East," he had taken his fourth bride after divorcing his estranged wife Jovanka, 54. A Yugoslav government spokesman angrily dismissed the stories as a "dirty trick" perpetrated by Tito's political opponents abroad.

Well-placed Yugoslavs were putting out two variations on the wedding-march theme. According to one version, Tito has "definitely" divorced Jovanka after 26 years of marriage. In disgrace for the past two years, she has been given a modest flat in Belgrade and a pension befitting a major in the Yugoslav army, the rank she held in Tito's World War II partisan forces. Meanwhile, Tito was smitten with Minutic, a Junoesque blond with a faint resemblance to Actress Anita Ekberg, after seeing her perform last summer. A "serious relationship exists," say the sources, but no marriage has taken place.

A second version has it that Tito and Jovanka are still living as husband and wife in the presidential residence in Belgrade. Though the pair have quarreled, Tito is said to be furious at the tales linking him with Minutic. The singer has frequently been seen in Tito's entourage, but she is actually the girlfriend of one of the President's security guards, according to the alternative story.

Whatever the truth, the principals were coolly going about their business last week. The tireless Tito visited Iraq, Syria and Jordan, while Minutic was singing La Traviata in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia. Minutic's father, when reached at his home in Dalmatia, denied the gossip about his daughter's romance. "The only thing they have in common," he said, "is their love for good music."

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