People, may 7, 1956

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Seldom had an author played one of his own characters so to the hilt as Fisherman Ernest Hemingway off the coast of Peru last week. To fill out the cast for the movie version of his novelette, The Old Man and the Sea, Nobelman Hemingway was angling, day after day, for a near-world-record black marlin (TIME, April 23) in one of that fish's favorite haunts, the famed Cabo Blanco deep-sea hunting ground. Ashore in the port of Talara, after a wearying day's cruise, "Papa" Hemingway not only looked like a stout version of his own Old Man; he also had a dejected air, as if sharks had robbed him of his prize marlin. Actually, his party had bagged only one fish, half the size of the giant he was after.

Fresh out of appeals on his five-year prison sentence (plus a $20,000 fine) for evading $28,532 in 1948-49 income taxes, Manhattan's frog-voiced Gambler Frank Costello, 64, took a legal gamble, croaked an offer to lam for his native Italy, if the federals would take the heat off him. The Government's answer: quit stalling and get off to the penitentiary.