People: Mar. 17, 1961

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The backdrop depicted the President's lush manor retreat in Virginia, and the prologue announced: "In this austere setting, we rejoice that never have so many reaped so much benefit from such large doses of misery." Thereupon, stage Democrats—including, of course, a regiment of simulated Kennedy relatives—rode to the hounds in pink riding jackets. It was the opening scene of the Washington Gridiron Club's annual political roast, and John F. Kennedy was present in person for the New Frontier's first ravaging by the press-corps parodists. While the catchy theme song was a doctored Good News (sample lyric: "Bad news! Everything's awful bad/ That's how we like it, bad news!"), there were other musical highlights, including a fast chorus—and count—by impersonators of Cook County Poll Watchers Jacob Arvey and Richard Daley, who warbled, to the tune of Tea for Two:

Two for you, and three for me

And here's a few ; they all are free

And counting fast, I see they're cast for

Jack.

But the bipartisan farce also opened such vistas as Ike's deluxe hobo jungle in Palm Springs, where a servant said, "He stopped over in Gettysburg just long enough to collect his soil conservation check," and the Capitol satirists duly noted that "Nelson Rockefeller is trying to rush through the 20th century before Barry Goldwater repeals it."

Turning a Homburg trick unique in U.S. history, David K. E. Bruce, former Ambassador to France and Germany, arrived in London to present his credentials to the Court of St. James's, became the first U.S. diplomat ever to hold the top three European ambassadorships. With him and no less practiced was Second Wife Evangeline Bell Bruce, a diplomat's daughter who grew up on four continents. While serving in Bonn two years ago, the multilingual mother of three, who was once cited as one of the "World's Ten Best-Dressed Women," earned a rare eulogy from another ambassador's lady: "Evangeline Bruce gives us all a complex. If only she were less intelligent, less attractive or less chic. It is impossible to compete with her."

Lying in a hospital oxygen tent in London, the city of pea-soup viruses, Cinemactress Elizabeth Taylor, 29, was suffering from double pneumonia so severe that one of her six doctors told Husband Eddie Fisher that she had only one hour to live. Throughout the week Liz's condition made huge headlines. But at week's end — following an emergency tracheotomy, intravenous feeding through the ankle, blood transfusions, and the desperation use of a brand-new electric respirator — Elizabeth Taylor, who had undergone more than a dozen previous hospitalizations, was pronounced on the mend.