People: Jul. 1, 1966

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Eight million people were invited to the blast; mercifully, only 35,000 of them could make it. Still, it was quite a party on Central Park Mall when New York City turned out for the season's first Guggenheim Memorial Concert. The band tooted out such swinging numbers as The New York Light Guards Quickstep and The New York Hippodrome March for the turn-of-the-century stomp. Then, too, there was a catchy little act by a couple of beblaz-ered vaudevillians, Mayor John Lindsay and Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving, who went around tipping boater and bowler at each other. Hotcha!

The new moon rose over London's Albert Hall to cue in a loony howler called the Greater-Than-London Fire New Moon Carnival of Poetry. Some 2,000 shaggies and stringies in mod costume settled down for a cultural evening that began with a villanelle of squeals and grunts. The caterwauling doggerel went on, with the audience chanting a "Sound Mass"—"MUTAMA! MUTAMA! M'MUTA!"—and Actress Vanessa Redgrave, 29, whose benefit appearances in the past have included ban-the-bomb marches, standing up in Castro-style fatigues to sing Fidel's freedom song, Guantanamera. Before the moon was down, leonine Poet Robert Graves, 70, advised the kids on using drugs: "A real person needs nothing like that." Unnecessary advice, since most of the poetasters were already high on beer and left the hall in a shambles.

In the months before he shot himself to death in the summer of 1890, Vincent Van Gogh was in and out of the asylums at Aries and Saint-Rémy. Released, he traveled to Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris and stayed at a café owned by a couple named Ravoux. There he painted a lucid portrait of the couple's 16-year-old daughter before he lapsed into the madness that took his life. Portrait de Mademoiselle Ravoux survived, was bought in 1921 for $20,000, along with two other Van Gogh works, by a sharp-eyed Pennsylvania clergyman named Theodore Pitcairn. Last week at Christie's in London, it was sold at auction to an anonymous collector for $441,000—the highest price ever paid for a Van Gogh. The proceeds will go to Pastor Pitcairn's Swedenborgian Lord's New Church in Bryn Athyn, Pa.

About a month ago, Lyndon Johnson went through an awfully hectic week, dashing about for more public appointments, ceremonies, speeches and meetings than reporters could remember in months. They were at a loss to account for it all until last week, when it came out that Writer Jim Bishop, 58, had chosen that period to poke around the White House gathering material for another of his Day books—this one A Day in the Life of President Johnson. The President put in a beautiful day. "He's a heckuva man," marveled Bishop. And, more to the point, "a heckuva producer!"