Thanks, D.B., Wherever You Are

--A 14-year-old Oklahoma boy and an insurance company split about $6,000 in tattered $20 bills--water-stained loot that is the only trace ever found of the notorious 1971 hijacker, D.B. Cooper. Brian Ingram of El Reno, Okla., and Steve Rickles, an attorney for Royal Globe Insurance Co., said in Portland, Ore., that the fragile bills will be offered for sale to collectors, rather than redeemed at the Treasury Department for new currency. “College,” Brian said when asked by reporters what he planned to do with his share. “And I’m looking for a farmhouse.” Brian, son of Dwayne and Patricia Ingram, found the money buried in a sandy bank of the Columbia River northwest of Vancouver, Wash., six years ago near where Cooper is believed to have parachuted out of a Northwest Orient Airlines jet on Thanksgiving eve in 1971 with $200,000 in ransom from the airline strapped to his waist and stuffed in his shirt. The serial numbers matched those on the bills given to Cooper, and the FBI held the money for evidence until now. The discovery of the money appeared to confirm the belief of many law enforcement officials that Cooper plunged into the river and drowned.

--Yale University has bought the papers of Robert Penn Warren, the nation’s first poet laureate. The acquisition includes the working and final drafts of most of Warren’s writings from 1929 to the present, David E. Schoonover, curator of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s American literature collection, said in New Haven, Conn. Warren, 81, won two Pulitzer Prizes for poetry and one for fiction--”All the King’s Men.” He is a professor emeritus of English at Yale. The Beinecke American literature collection includes the archives of such authors as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Eugene O’Neill and Langston Hughes.

--Elizabeth Taylor says self-pity, stubbornness and insecurity led to her excessive drinking and eating, which she has now conquered. When she felt sorry for herself, Taylor says, she told herself, “ ‘Poor Elizabeth. Let’s have a little reward, then.’ And it would be chocolate ice cream and hot fudge.” She compounded things when the fat jokes started. “I don’t know anybody who enjoys fat jokes and all . . . they did was make me more recalcitrant,” she says in a series of interviews on the NBC program “Today.” “I’m much more secure with myself than I was before,” she says. “I used to drink because I thought it would help my shyness.” Taylor says also that her favorite movies are “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and “National Velvet.” “I was ‘Velvet,’ ” she says. “I ate, breathed, talked nothing but horses.”