People: Mar. 19, 1965

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It was a career any man could be proud of, leading him from law school through the attorney general's office to become, in 1952, at the age of 34, West Virginia's youngest Governor in history. Four years later, he ran for the Senate but was defeated—and then William C. Marland dropped from public sight. Last week he held a brief press conference in Chicago. A reporter had spotted him behind the wheel of a taxi, making $70 a week. "I simply fell apart because of my drinking," he said, explaining that he had bounced around from job to job until now he has joined Alcoholics Anonymous and is trying to make a new start. He drives for the Flash Cab Co. twelve hours a day, visits his wife and four children in a Chicago suburb only on weekends while he rehabilitates himself. "I'd like to get back into the mainstream of life," he said. "But not politics."

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Was she really in, or way way out? There sat Britain's Princess Margaret, 34, at a rehearsal of the Royal Ballet School's Prince Igor, showing quite a bit of black mesh stockings all acrawl with dozens of artificial beetles. Bug beetles, with two e's, if you please. "The Royal Family in kinky"—meaning nonconformist—"stockings at last," chirped the London Sun's Fashion Writer Jean Rook, who then swatted: "Are Margaret's new, or were they hidden away in her bottom drawer?" They cost only 6s. 11d., continued the ruthless Rook, and while they're still the rage in the U.S., the fad is waning in England. Selfridges stopped selling them a year ago —all of which goes to show that Meg's royal duties obviously leave her little time to think kinky.

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Genealogists are digging into the roots of the Roosevelt family tree to find out more about a mid-17th century gentleman recalled by Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., 50. Chatting with newsmen in Washington, the Under Secretary of Commerce explained that although he's related in one way or another to twelve U.S. Presidents, "including my father,"* it really doesn't help much in politics. There is one ancestor with contemporary significance, he added—his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, a second-generation American named Humphrey Johnson.

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Classic or simply crummy, the bulk of modern English lewd literature first tumbled into print in the Paris loft of Maurice Girodias, 45, proprietor of Olympia Press. Now, laments the first publisher of Tropic of Cancer, The Black Book, Lolita, Fanny Hill and Candy, "our role is ended." Through the imposition, by his count, of 60 bans, 100 lawsuits and six suspended prison sentences, the French government has finally got through to Girodias. "The astonishing truth is," he says, "that moral and artistic freedom have now become a reality in Britain and the U.S., whereas the same concepts are being denied, denigrated and officially ostracized in France." So Girodias is planning to pack his plain wrappers and open an Olympia office in Manhattan, where, he asserts, "It will only take five or ten years for censorship to disappear completely in America."

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