Milestones: Jul. 4, 1983

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SEEKING DIVORCE. Neil Simon, 55, playwright and screenwriter; and Marsha Mason, 41, actress for whom he wrote lead parts in the movies Max Dugan Returns, Only When I Laugh, The Goodbye Girl and Chapter Two, the last a lightly disguised comic portrait of their courtship and marriage; after ten years of marriage; no children; in Los Angeles.

DIED. Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, 64, former President of Fidel Castro's Cuba from 1959 to 1976, when Castro took over the job; by his own hand (he shot himself reportedly as a result of depression and a painful back ailment); in Havana. A dignified, rather bourgeois Communist, in contrast to the bearded, fatigue-clad rebel leaders, Dorticós chaired the country's main economic planning body and was the regime's No. 3 man, after the Castros, Fidel and his younger brother Raúl.

DIED. Robert A. Lewis, 65, co-pilot of the B-29 Enola Gay on its August 1945 mission to drop the atom bomb over Hiroshima; of a heart attack; in Smithfield, Va. A test pilot of the then new B29, he was chosen because he was known to be cool under stress, though watching the blast he said, "My God, what have we done!" Lewis kept a private record of the flight, which he later sold for $37,000. "If I live a hundred years," he wrote, "I'll never quite get these few minutes out of my mind."

DIED. Simcha Ehrlich, 67, Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, an uncharismatic but influential politician and a moderate voice in Menachem Begin's ruling coalition; of a stroke; in Jerusalem. A Polish-born optician who was elected to the Knesset in 1969, he became chairman of the Liberal Party and, in 1977, Begin's Finance Minister, since the Liberals were the second largest element in the victorious Likud bloc. Ehrlich took the credit, then the blame, for the government's "economic revolution," which led to Israel's chronic triple-digit inflation. He resigned the finance portfolio in 1979 and became Deputy Prime Minister, joining Begin in opposing hard-lining Ariel Sharon and helping to hold together a Cabinet divided over last year's invasion of Lebanon.

DIED. William E. Miller, 69, seven-term New York State Republican Congressman and lawyer, who ran for Vice President of the U.S. on Barry Goldwater's ill-fated 1964 ticket; of a stroke; in Buffalo. After the defeat, Miller returned to Lockport, N.Y., and obscurity, re-emerging briefly in a 1975 American Express card commercial ("Do you know me?") for which he is at least as well remembered nationally as for his political career.