Milestones: Jul. 9, 1965

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Married. Gamble Benedict, 24, Remington typewriter heiress, whose endlessly publicized 1960 runaway marriage to onetime Chauffeur Andrei Porumbeanu was annulled last October; and Thomas Gallagher, 32, former New York Thruway motorcycle cop, now an $11,500-a-year State Police investigator; both for the second time; in a Roman Catholic ceremony (the church does not recognize either of their first marriages); in Clinton, N.Y.

Married. Jane Powell, 36, Hollywood's Baby Jane of the 1950s (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers), now on the nightclub circuit; and James D. Fitzgerald, 33, her onetime business manager; she for the third time, he for the second; in Sydney, Australia, where she is on a singing tour.

Married. Kingsley Amis, 43, Britain's maturing, anti-Establishment novelist (One Fat Englishman), most recently turned student of 007 (The James Bond Dossier), whom he humorously and minutely examines from poison tip to blade-edged toe; and Elizabeth Jane Howard, 42, fellow novelist (The Sea Change); he for the second time, she for the third; in London.

Died. Robert Alexander ("Steve") Cochran, 48, Hollywood heavy (The Big Operator, The Deadly Companions), a brawny onetime shipyard worker who played movieland mobsters and occasional heroes, except for a surprising leap into Italian avant-garde as the lovesick mechanic in Antonioni's IlGrido; of pulmonary edema, aboard his 33-ft. ketch Rogue, while sailing the Pacific from Acapulco to Costa Rica with a crew of three Mexican women, who drifted helplessly for ten days after his death until they were rescued by a U.S. fishing boat off the coast of Guatemala.

Died. Robert Chester Ruark, 49, author and columnist, a North Carolina backwoods boy who began as a sportswriter for the Washington Daily News, in 1946 caught the eye of Scripps-Howard Boss Roy Howard and was given a daily (later thrice weekly) column eventually syndicated in 104 U.S. newspapers, in which he stated his tough-guy opinions on everything from women's fashions to modern art, reserving his most abrasive insights for Africa in two race-baiting bestsellers (Something of Value, Uhuru) about Kenya, from which he was then barred in 1962; of internal hemorrhages; in London.

Died. T. Ashton Thompson, 49, Democratic Congressman from Louisiana's 7th District (Lake Charles) since 1952, champion of wildlife conservation; of injuries sustained when he was struck by a swerving tractor-trailer while standing on a parking strip off a 4-lane highway talking to a patrolman who had stopped him for speeding; on Interstate 85, near Gastonia, N.C.

Died. Claude Thornhill, 55, pianist bandleader, whose sweet, glossy arrangements of jazz and popularized classics (Warsaw Concerto, Nutcracker Suite), as well as his own compositions (Snowfall), swung high in the big-band era from 1939 to 1947, thereafter maintained a respectable success at college proms and the few remaining big-time dance halls, such as Manhattan's Roseland, Atlantic City's Steel Pier; of a heart attack; in Caldwell, N.J.