People: Nov. 27, 1964

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When Ben Franklin in Paris opened at the Lunt-Fontanne, Music Man Robert Preston, 46, moved into the dressing room used last summer by Richard Burton. That seemed to set the tone of things. Three weeks later, Preston moved out on his offstage wife of 24 years, Catherine, and began to concentrate on after-theater sorties with his leading lady, Swedish Singer Ulla Sallert, 41. Ulla says it is "just a coincidence" that she is divorcing her husband of 19 years, Baron Franz von Lampe. "I am not a home-cracker," she coos, "but if I'm invited by my leading partner to dinner, I don't see why I shouldn't accept."

Cancer, said the doctors in 1821. But Frenchmen have always suspected that it was his British captors on St. Helena who slew Napoleon Bonaparte at the age of 51. Now a British scientist, Hamilton Smith, thinks he has proved it: he subjected samples of Napoleon's hair to nuclear bombardment in Britain's Harwell reactors and found arsenic! Only, being an Englishman, he says that his associates believe it was Napoleon's French chamberlain, General Charles-Tristan de Montholon, who poisoned the Emperor. French historians hooted down the theory as so much old lace. The hairs were fakes. And anyway, sneered a scholar in Napoleon's native Corsica: "It would be unthinkable to trouble the remains of the Emperor, even to clear the English of the blame."

Be it ever so decked out in satinstriped wallpaper, No. 10 Downing Street is still home to Gladys Mary Wilson, 48. The new P.M.'s wife has moved in her washing machine and drying rack ("I couldn't quite see myself hanging out the washing") and dismissed the cook, being a whiz herself at smoked haddock, custard, and those parched tea dainties known hopefully by the British as "little fairy cakes." Harold smothers everything else in steak sauce, and the Government Hospitality Service takes care of banquets. It was frightfully pleb to the ex-cook, Alice Green. "I would have made the best of it," she sniffed, "but Mrs. Wilson wanted to be a housewife."