SEEKING DIVORCE. Gary Hart, 43, Democratic Senator from Colorado; and Lee Ludwig Hart, 43, a real estate agent; after 23 years of marriage, two children. The couple separated for six months, then reunited last year during Hart's successful campaign for a second term.

DIED. Romulo Betancourt, 73, baseball-loving, pipe-smoking former President of Venezuela, who was revered as the father of democracy in his country and a hero throughout Latin America for his opposition to oppression; of a stroke; in New York City. The son of poor Spanish immigrants, Betancourt was a law student of 20 when he led the first of the antigovernment rebellions that would cause him to be imprisoned or exiled intermittently over much of his life. Having launched his Accion Democratica party in 1941, he joined a successful military coup four years later and, at 37, was appointed President. After three years of sweeping reforms--including establishment of the fifty-fifty formula that gave the government half of foreign oil companies' profits--he was toppled and forced again into exile. Returning to win an election victory in 1958, he promoted land reform and educational improvements during his second term. He peacefully relinquished power in 1964 and took up an influential role as elder statesman. Unlike many Latin American politicians, Betancourt left office faithful to his pledge that "the only wealth I have is my honor."

DIED. Robert Montgomery, 77, urbane film star of the 1930s and '40s (Night Must Fall, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, They Were Expendable), who went on to become a stage and screen director, a pioneering television producer and, during Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency, the first White House TV adviser; of cancer; in New York City. Flippant comedy roles on Broadway propelled him to Hollywood, where he became president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1935. In 1950 he launched Robert Montgomery Presents, one of TV's first major dramatic series, and kept it going for seven seasons.

DIED. Harry Golden, 79, humorist-cum-moralist who used the pages of his one-man newspaper, the Carolina Israelite, to celebrate the vagaries of life and attack racial discrimination, collecting his writings in the bestsellers Only in America (1958), For 2-c- Plain (1959) and Enjoy, Enjoy! (1960); of a heart attack; in Charlotte, N.C. A Jewish immigrant's son who was reared on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the portly, cigar-chomping Golden gravitated to the South and in 1941 founded the Israelite, which in its 26 years of publication numbered Harry Truman, Earl Warren, Adlai Stevenson and Carl Sandburg among its readers. A typical satirical proposal: the Golden Vertical Negro Plan to install stand-up desks in public schools because Southerners seemed averse only to sitting, not standing, next to blacks.

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