People: Jun. 25, 1965

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A precedent is always useful in court, so Gina Lollobrigida, 36, was saying: "The theater has always been full of daring performers since Grecian times —even the great Greta Gar bo, who undressed much more than today's actresses without creating a scandal." La Lollo was in a Roman court on charges of "outraging the public morals" by appearing apparently nude behind a bed sheet in Le Bambole (The Dolls). This was silly, said she, loftily. No great actress tries to create a scandal. "Even a spicy part can be done seriously." And besides, she cooed to the judge, it wasn't really she beneath the sheet—merely flesh-colored tights. So the judge reserved judgment, shook her hand warmly, and went off to study the evidence of art imitating reality.

The night they ran A Star Is Born on the late show, Liza Minnelli, 21, found her own rainbow. Poised, but grinning gleefully, she stood before a packed ballroom at Manhattan's Hotel Astor to accept the American Theater Wing's "Tony" award as the season's best musical actress for her Broadway debut in Flora, the Red Menace, a tepid comedy she heats up with a dramatic voice that brings memories of Garland yet is still her own. Her mother Judy couldn't attend; she was at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of the U.C.L.A. Medical Center in Los Angeles, recovering from what friends said was an allergic reaction to a drug. A few nights later, though, she was out, staging still another the-show-must-go-on performance and evoking memories of her own by belting her way through 40 minutes of the old songs at Las Vegas' Thunderbird Hotel. She left the stage to an ovation from the blase Vegas audience.

After six years of painful, reclusive silence, Author J. D. Salinger, 46, has produced another story. It's no Catcher in the Rye or Franny and Zooey—just one more refraction through his magic Glasses in the form of a letter that Seymour Glass, the fictional family's presiding guru and ghost, wrote home from Camp Hapworth, Maine, at the tender age of seven. Published in The New Yorker, the note is introduced briefly by Family Historian Buddy Glass, who for years has been garrulously obsessed by the memory of his suicide brother. By the letter, Childe Seymour seems to have been, practically from birth, a perfervid scholar, linguist, spiritual genius and altogether verbose little man who finds everything in life "heartrending," or "damnable." "My emotions are too damnably raw today, I fear," he starts, and in 28,000 words plunges forth to speculate on God, reincarnation, Proust, Balzac, baseball and the charms of the camp director's wife ("quite perfect legs, ankles, saucy bosoms, very fresh, cute hind quarters"), while insistently querying his parents about "what imaginary-sensual acts gave lively, unmentionable entertainment to your minds."