Milestones: Mar. 21, 1969

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Married. Paul McCartney, 26, last of the bachelor Beatles; and Linda Eastman, 27, honey-blonde American photographer and sister of Beatles Lawyer John Eastman, who met Paul at a news conference in Manhattan ten months ago; she for the second time; in a civil ceremony in London, enlivened somewhat by a covey of wounded birds wailing their anguish from behind a police cordon.

Died. Adhemar de Barros, 67, Brazilian politician who served three terms as Governor of Sao Paulo State, busy center of Latin American industry; of a heart attack; in Paris. After becoming Governor in 1938, De Barros spent his 28-year reign building a network of highways and hospitals. He also took an impressive cut off the top of the porco barrel, openly bragged of tampering with ballot boxes. Still, he survived all purges, until President Humberto Branco could tolerate his corruption no longer. De Barros was exiled in 1966.

Died. Ben Shahn, 70, U.S. portraitist, poster maker, muralist and artistic polemicist; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. "Is there nothing to weep, about in this world any more?" the shaggy-bearded artist once asked. For him, the answer was always yes. Son of a Russian-born immigrant, Shahn was raised in a Brooklyn slum, and his proletarian vision was forged in the class-consciousness of the Depression. He employed elements of both Cubism and Surrealism in his own spare variant of social realism. In 1932 he won fame portraying the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Thereafter, his angry melancholy illuminated a memorable sequence of arriving immigrants, lonely lovers, World War II factory workers, Japanese fallout victims. His TIME magazine covers included Freud, Lenin, Martin Luther King. Despite advancing age, he continued to experiment and to donate posters to favorite causes, most recently the presidential candidacy of Senator Eugene McCarthy.

Died. Charles Brackett, 76, screenwriter and producer, whose 30-year Hollywood stint brought him three Oscars and a six-year term (1949-55) as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; of a stroke; in Bel Air, Calif. Brackett began writing short stories for the Saturday Evening Post, soon switched to The New Yorker as drama critic. Next stop was Hollywood in 1932, where he and Billy Wilder collaborated on 15 pictures, including Academy Award winners The Lost Weekend (1945) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). Brackett's final Oscar was for his Titanic (1953) screenplay, which captured all the heroism and much of the horror of the world's greatest maritime disaster.