People: Aug. 31, 1970

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"For the first time in 25 years I'm seeing the world without an alcoholic haze," Richard Burton boasted last week. And all because wife Elizabeth bet her convivial Welshman that he couldn't abstain for three months. A trimmer Burton has not only won the wager (a kiss or something; he forgets), but has stretched his dry period to nearly six months. Lest his public misunderstand his sober ways, Burton begged his interviewer: "Please don't make me out to be against alcohol. I'll get all sorts of letters from the temperance people, and I certainly don't want to encourage their cause. I owe a lot to booze, so I don't want to offend it."

The friendship between former Senator George A. Smothers and President John F. Kennedy was firm, but often tried. Cuba was the toughest trial, as newly opened documents at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library showed last week. From the 1960 presidential campaign onward, Smathers urged Kennedy to take a hard line against Cuba. The President listened until the Bay of Pigs invasion, after which he told his friend: "George, I don't want you to talk to me any more about Cuba." Smathers stopped—for a while. But one evening at an informal supper, Smathers says: "I raised the question of Cuba and what could be done. He took his fork and hit his plate, and it cracked and he said, 'Now dammit! Let's quit talking about this subject.' " Smathers did.

Who says you can't go home again? Janis Joplin did it last week, and for her special effort won the prize—a flat tire—as the member of the class of '60 who had come the farthest for the reunion (from San Francisco to Port Arthur, Texas). Her Thomas Jefferson High School chums were more than a little bit surprised to find that she hadn't changed much, except for her feathered, wild, mod clothes. One buddy muttered rather sadly of the let-it-all-hang-out soul-rock singer: "I hate to say she was a real lady because that's not her image. But she was."

She has served her country in three wars, and plans to leave this fall for her eighth annual tour of duty in Viet Nam. Martha Raye, however, will not be playing her mod-witch part from Bugaloos, a fall TV show, but will serve as a surgical nurse with the Green Berets. The Nightingale role is hardly a new one for Colonel Raye, who has been a sometime practicing nurse ever since 1936. Twice hit by shrapnel during the Viet Nam years, she bravely classifies her wounds as "not serious. Once in the foot, once in the ribs. I've had worse hangovers."

Retired Cape Town Dentist Philip Blaiberg lived longer than any other heart-transplant patient, 191 months. But last week his 22-year-old daughter Jill belittled her father's borrowed time and blasted the operation and Surgeon Christiaan Barnard. "I personally think heart transplants are not worthwhile. I saw my father suffer." She blamed Dr. Barnard for urging the family to make money out of the operation. The resultant publicity, she said, "set my life back by more than two years."