People: Jun. 30, 1961

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The 1959 debut of Charlotte Ford, older daughter of Henry Ford II, has often been called "the party of the century." But last week, after the motor company board chairman laid on another successful gala, the title was in doubt. The latest refulgent debutante: Charlotte's sister, Anne Ford, 18. Paris Decorator Jacques Frank spent more than a year turning the Fords' Grosse Pointe Farms estate into a Versailles-like setting for the familiar blueblood-boiling beat of Bandleader Meyer Davis. And not even an hours-long downpour—which soaked through the turquoise-colored roof of the vast pavilion and kept a mop-and-bucket brigade of 70 swabbing through the night —could douse the enthusiasm of the stag line, as Anne's photograph album of her coming-out will forever record.

"Where I come from," sighed Blues Singer Ethel Waters to a Los Angeles reporter, "people never got close enough to money to get up a working acquaintance with it, so I didn't know how to keep it." In Pasadena, where she is living with friends, the 60-year-old ex-songstress-actress and co-author of the bestselling autobiography. His Eye Is on the Sparrow, admitted that she was dead broke, ill with a heart condition, yet never happier. "I'm not afraid to die, honey," said she. "In fact, I'm kinda looking forward to it; I know the Lord has his arms wrapped around this big fat sparrow."

Believed to be privately unsympathetic toward her son Fidel's Cuban revolution, Lina Ruz de Castro stirred inevitable rumors of defection when she flew out of Havana bound for Mexico City. But upon landing at Central Airport, she loyally respun her long-playing public apologia for the new "socialism"—"Everything is fine; we are enchanted"—and explained the prosaic purpose of her trip: Daughter Emma, wife of Mexican Engineer Victor Lomeli Delgado, is expecting a first child.

In Los Angeles' Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where she is being treated for osteomyelitis, ex-Cinemactress Marion Davies, 61, tumbled to the floor and broke her left leg. The accident caused long-distance concern to a longtime acquaintance, Joseph P. Kennedy, who has sent three specialists from the East to the Davies bedside during the past month.

In Chicago to harangue the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P., Harlem's Democratic Congressman Adam Clayton Powell urged the ouster of A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany on an unexpected charge: absenteeism. Noting that Meany refused to "tear himself away from the Florida sunshine to testify on the important minimum-wage bill," Powell, who usually plays his own hooky in Puerto Rico, evaluated the onetime Bronx plumber as "stupid" and "absolutely zero as a lobbyist and leader."

Washington's Republican Congressman Jack Westland, 56, who left the hustings during his first successful House campaign in 1952 to win the National Amateur Golf Championship, was named captain of the U.S. Walker Cup team, which will battle Britain in September. Although the five-term Representative still gets around Burning Tree and the Congressional Country Club links in the early 70s, he only finds time for golf on weekends, and his new post is strictly a non-playing proposition.