Milestones: Dec. 18, 1964

Divorced. By Sue Lyon, 18, cine-nymphet (Lolitd) and teen tease (The Night of the Iguana): Hampton Fancher III, 26, sometime flamenco dancer, who was banned from the Iguana set for Lyonizing Sue; on grounds of mental cruelty; after ten months of marriage; in Santa Monica, Calif.

Divorced. By Dorothy Malone, 39, $3,000-a-week star of Peyton Place, TV's serialized sexpose of small-town life: Jacques Bergerac, 38, French lawyer-actor previously married to Ginger Rogers; on grounds of extreme cruelty; after five years of marriage, two children; in Los Angeles.

Died. Sam Cooke, 32, Negro rock-'n'-roll singer who sold 10 million records (You Send Me, Kissing Cousins) in nine years, last spring advertised his appearance at a Manhattan nightclub with a 20-ft. by 100-ft. billboard that proclaimed "Sam's the biggest Cooke in town"; of bullet wounds inflicted by a motel proprietress when the singer burst in on her half-clad; in Los Angeles.

Died. Koji Harashima, 54, Japanese religious and political leader, a onetime schoolteacher who in 1940 joined the leftist Buddhist sect, Soka Gakkai (TiME, Dec. 11), rose to be its second-in-command and last month organized the movement's political arm, the Clean Government Party, which already ranks as the nation's third largest political force; of a heart attack; in Tokyo.

Died. Walter Gibson, 63, Wall Street broker widely credited as the sole inventor of the subspecial martini that bears his surname; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. As a habitue of the Ritz in Paris, Gibson gratified two hitherto mutually exclusive tastes, for dry gin and pickled pearl onions, by schooling the bartender to substitute a single Allium cepa for the conventional olive in his favorite cocktail. His claim was coldly, drily disputed, however, by those who attributed the gin-onion union to Artist Charles Dana Gibson or the late Will Gibson, Gene Tunney's primetime manager.

Died. Lord ("Billy") Rootes, 70, chairman and co-founder of the Rootes auto company and organizer of Britain's postwar export drive to the U.S., a ruddy, supercharged salesman who, with the help of his brother Sir Reginald Rootes ("I get the ideas and Reggie tells me why they can't be carried out"), turned his father's auto-sales firm into Britain's largest distributor by unloading cars as fast as they could be delivered, then, deciding that the manufacturers were "too sluggish," bought up the Hillman, Singer, Sunbeam and Humber automaking firms and led the raid on the U.S. economy-car market in the early 1950s, making the family-owned Rootes Group such a profitable venture that Chrysler last year paid $35.2 million for a 30% interest in the company; in London.

Died. Percy Kilbride, 76, Hollywood's "Pa Kettle," a skilled Broadway character actor who won hayseedy fame as the first of the Beverly hillbillies, got so bored with lucrative Kettle-boilers (seven in all) that he refused to make any more; of injuries suffered when a car struck him three months ago; in Los Angeles.