People: Aug. 29, 1969

"O my Beauty Boy—reading Plato so divine! O, dark, oh fair . . ."A melodramatic opening for a short, story, but consider the plot: the colored golf champion of Chicago, who reads Plato, loses a leg under a moving train and finally grows it back in Heaven. A magazine fiction editor might reach for a rejection slip were it not for the byline: F. Scott Fitzgerald. The unpublished "Dearly Beloved," a forerunner of the black-is-beautiful genre, was discovered among a collection of Fitzgerald's papers at the Princeton University Library, and is included in the first number of a schol- arly journal known as the Fitzgerald-Hemingway Annual. Written shortly before the novelist's death in 1940, "Dear-ly Beloved" carries the familiar Gatsbyesque message that reality rarely adapts itself to a dreamer's dreams. It ends with the casual, melancholy remark, "So things go.*

Pizzicato passages, stratospheric glissandi, cadenza after cadenza—the balding, blue-eyed violinist tackled each without hesitation and butchered each in turn, always about a quarter-tone off pitch. Eventually, the concertmaster mercifully took the solo play away from the wounded virtuoso. The Aspen, Colo., audience was delighted by the shenanigans. They had, after all, paid as much as $50 to see and hear Jack Benny's violin act which, like his familiar monologues, is a masterpiece of comic tim ing. Benny, 75, and his fiddle have raised well over $5,000,000 at similar benefits, and this one netted $14,000 for the Aspen Music School Scholarship Fund. Unfortunately, Benny lamented, not all patrons are kind enough to suspend their critical faculties. "In Philadelphia, a woman stood up and exclaimed, 'My God, he's lost his ear.' Ever since then, they've called me the Van Gogh of the violin."

One of America's Apollo 11 heroes has doffed his space suit for the last time. Appearing on TV, Mike Collins agreed with Neil Armstrong that Mars is a possibility by 1981, then announced that he would make no more journeys into space. At 38, said Collins, he finds the rugged physical training too demanding, and he dislikes the long absences from his family. But, he added, he hoped to continue in the program in an administrative position of some sort.

The rumors have kept Washington gossips busy for months, and now it seems official. Senator Eugene McCarthy has moved out of his Washington home and has rented an apartment at the Sheraton-Park Hotel. Neither McCarthy nor Abigail, his wife of 24 years, offered any explanation, and the Senator's press secretary insisted that "no divorce is contemplated." The word in Washington, however, was that lawyers for both sides were at work on a legal separation; after one year, that would constitute grounds for divorce in the District of Columbia.