People: Jan. 5, 1962

Long bemused by tennis-playing amazons ("Pam, I adore you, Pam, you great big mountainous sports girl"), Britain's bestselling Poet John Betjeman, 55, lit out for Australia in November all clutched up: "I could not write and was afraid to try; I felt I was finished." But last week, back in London again, Latter-Day Victorian Betjeman felt himself once more summoned by belles. "Australia," he glowed, "is a wonderful country with a wonderful future, magnificent oysters and wines, and athletic girls of the type I like best—with long hair and legs, and turned-up noses."

"This business of being single," decided Billy Rose not long ago, "is like a big red and gold candy box which, when opened, has two lousy bonbons in it." Last week, fleeing the candy box, the retired Enfant Terrible of Broadway, now 62. took time off from filling out his collection of A.T.&T. shares (with 80,000, worth roughly $11 million, he is now the company's second biggest stockholder) to swell his collection of marriage licenses to four. For his latest fling at matrimony, Billy chose a familiar partner: ex-Showgirl Joyce Mathews, 42. to whom he was previously married from 1956 to 1959. (His first two wives: the late Fanny Brice and Big Dipper Eleanor Holm.) For Joyce, even a nuptial doubleheader was no novelty, two of her four earlier flounces to the altar having been made with Milton Berle.

"Under Secret Service guard," read a breathless report from the Associated Press. "Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy slipped out of Palm Beach last night and for an hour and a half danced the 'Twist' in a Fort Lauderdale nightclub." Within hours, livid Presidential Press Secretary Pierre Salinger set the wires burning again with the charge that the story "was a cheap effort by a nightclub owner to use the First Family for publicity purposes," and A. P. President Benjamin McKelway was servicing a wordy personal apology to Jackie. Cause of all the hubbub: a zingy Jackie-lookalike, Stephanie Laye Javits, socialite wife of the nephew of New York's Republican Senator Jacob Javits, had been undulating at the Golden Falcon, near Pompano Beach. Shrugged Steffi: "I don't know what I can do about it; I have to be me. I've been me as long as she's been Jackie, and I don't imagine either one of us is going to change much now."

As he prepared to wind up 44 years of naval service with a final piping over the side this week, Admiral Charles ("Cat") Brown, 62, retiring Commander in Chief of Allied Forces, Southern Europe, already had a new mission in view: establishing a European beachhead for St. Louis' jet-and missile-making McDonnell Aircraft Corp. Working out of Paris, the Navy's salty "Grey Eagle"* will peddle the successors to the fighter craft he began piloting back in 1924 as a roistering junior officer on the first U.S. aircraft carrier, the old Langley.