People: Mar. 9, 1962

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Four weeks after the 35-ft. fall that killed two other members of the high wire's famed Flying Wallendas (TIME, Feb. 9), Survivor Mario Wallenda, 22, had recovered sufficiently to undergo two-and-a-half hours of surgery on his shattered spine. "His prognosis for life," announced the Highland Park (Mich.) General Hospital, "is good, but he is a paraplegic, and his chances of walking normally again are hopeless."

The pawns were human when World Chess Champion Mikhail Botvinnik took on the 1957 titleholder, Vassily Smyslov, in a "Peace Fund" benefit match that enthralled 15,000 Muscovites. So were the king, queen, and all the other pieces in the latest Marxist evolution of an ancient Oriental version of chess. But unlike the Eastern game—in which, according to legend, the chessmen were prisoners of war, and once taken, were beheaded—the Soviet game employed beauteous ballerinas and assorted other troupers, each of whom, upon being captured, put on a performance. So distracting, in fact, was the circus atmosphere (the show stopper: a satirical song that went, "Kings get five-room apartments Knights get single rooms And pawns get nothing at all") that peerless Grand Master Botvinnik could do no better than a draw.

Their matchless energy finally running low, Brother Plenipotentiary Bobby Kennedy and Hurricane Ethel blew into Washington's National Airport from the last leg of their four-week, 14-country world tour. Eagerly waiting at the field was their brood of seven, which had prepared a skit parodying the parental trip. But before the breathless kids could go onstage, the nation's business intervened again. "We're going to the White House," announced the Attorney General. Wondered his Washington-wise wife: "To get debriefed?"

Turning up at London's most merciless sacred-cow roast, Queen Elizabeth II chuckled her way through the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe with two other targets: Foreign Secretary Lord Home and Her Majesty's censorious Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Scarbrough. Though one member of the show's unholy quartet sourly reflected that "if we had wounded the Establishment as much as we intended, the Queen's advisers would not have let her come," a more mellow colleague took comfort in the fact that not a line had been cut from the hard-hitting script in deference to the Queen's presence. Said he: "We thought the best thing to do was to ignore her—in the politest possible way, of course."

What was planned to be a quiet, out-of-the-way wedding for Romano Mussolini, 34, jazz pianist son of II Duce, and Maria Scicolone, 23, curvy kid sister of Sophia Loren, turned into a tragicomic Roman holiday. With tumultuous thousands mobbing the tiny church at Predappio (where his father is buried), the bridegroom fainted dead away, but was revived by injection of a stimulant in time to weather the ceremony. The day came to an ill-starred conclusion when the chauffeur-driven Rolls of sister Sophia was involved in a collision that killed a local schoolteacher.