People, Jan. 17, 1972

A 1952 Italian law stipulates that the widow of a Prime Minister gets a 50% higher pension than the widow of an ordinary Minister. So one 81-year-old woman is suing the government for a raise in her pension from $258.40 to $387.60 a month. After all, Husband Benito Mussolini was Italy's Fascist Prime Minister from 1922 to 1943 (he was eventually shot by anti-Fascist partisans and then hung by his heels alongside his mistress). When Italian newspapers questioned whether the dictator's widow really deserved more money—plus the return of three Mussolini farms that the government had confiscated—Donna Rachele retorted: "Non facciamo ridere i polli" (literally, "Let's not make the chickens laugh"—meaning "Don't be silly"). -

In a delightfully improbable piece of casting, Raquel Welch is going to play that blank-eyed, block-bodied moppet of the comic strips, Little Orphan Annie, in a CBS-TV special called Funny Papers. Annie's superrich, superreactionary guardian, Daddy Warbucks, will be portrayed by Carroll O'Connor, the Archie Bunker of All in the Family. "We got into a little discussion about just how sexy Daddy Warbucks was," said Raquel. "We wondered how close he should get to Little Orphan Annie, and whether we should indicate that there might have been a little something going on between them. It turned out that Daddy Warbucks is straight city, but Carroll O'Connor is pretty sexy. We compromised and played it halfway close."

Lucky Matthias! Papa Willy Brandt, Chancellor of West Germany, was finally finished with those earnest confabulations with President Nixon and had taken him to the brand-new Disney World at Orlando, Fla., where Mickey Mouse himself turned out to show him around. Forty-four-year-old Mickey (enacted by a Disney employee) and ten-year-old Matthias, in a T shirt decorated with a big, stars-and-stripes "USA," walked around hand in hand, moving diplomacy into a new dimension.

If the scales of justice weigh heavily on a Chief Justice of the United States, so sometimes a Chief Justice weighs heavily on the scales. Especially if he is retired, like Earl Warren, 80, who has checked into Southern California's posh fat farm, La Costa, to slough off 15 lbs. in two weeks of diet and exercise. And who should be outside the doctor's office on the first day but his old friend Actress Olivia de Havilland, 56. "I was so moved to meet him again after all this time," gushed Olivia, also in for two weeks and 15 lbs. "He's the most darling man—I've had a crush on him for 35 years."