People: Nov. 25, 1966

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The way his one-week Austrian state visit was going, Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny ought to paraphrase a classic Kennedy remark by saying: "I am the man who accompanied Natalya Nikolaevna Podgornaya to Vienna." His daughter Natasha, 21, a shy Moscow medical student, was winning the Viennese in a way that crusty Podgorny never could, constantly outspacing her father in the daily papers, which delighted in chronicling all her visits to shops and operas. Papa Podgorny looks disconcertingly like Nikita Khrushchev, but Natasha, wearing sometimes dowdy Russian fashions and no makeup, had such a fresh nonpolitical charm for the Austrians that one government official observed: "She's the best public relations gimmick the Russians have."

After a year as deputy mayor of New York City, sharp-spoken Lawyer Robert Price, 34, thought it was time to turn his sword into a plowshare, resigned to become executive vice president of the mutual-funding Dreyfus Corp. "The only advice I can give my successor," he said, "is to work hard, stay clean, walk with your back to the wall and keep your Bible handy."

"He's got to be joking!" hoo-ha'd Elizabeth Taylor, 34. Funny thing, but Singer Eddie Fisher, 38, was serious. On grounds of "extreme cruelty," he asked Los Angeles Superior Court to give him a divorce from Liz more than two years after she married Richard Burton. Eddie doesn't think Liz ever got a valid divorce, since he was not represented at the 1964 proceedings in Mexico. And to make the joke seem even bigger, he requested the court "to determine the nature and extent of the community property of the plaintiff and the defendant and that the same be divided equally between them." On that basis, Plaintiff Fisher could collect as community property about $1,000,000 of the money she earned in Cleopatra, her epic romance with Dick.

In 1959, Miss Holland won after tattling to the judges that Miss Italy's bathing suit was padded. Last year there were wails of "fix" when a Miss United Kingdom won the contest for the second straight time, and this year's Miss World competition didn't promise to be much more ladylike. When the winner was finally chosen in London's Lyceum Ballroom, green-eyed Miss Malta shrieked: "The judges must be blind!" Not at all, though they did show a certain lack of foresight in picking Miss India, Bombay Medical Student Reita Faria, 23. The new Miss World isn't especially interested in the title. Collecting her $7,000 prize money, she waved away the usual lucrative year of personal-appearance and film offers, prepared to rush home instead to finish her studies, become a gynecologist and marry a Bengal tea planter.