For the needs of Red China, Comrade Soong Ching-ling has a warm and open hearth. When the nation's mass drive for steel started a month ago, the 68-year-old lady had her secretaries build a small furnace in the garden of her Shanghai home. There--said Radio Peking--the secretaries now toil blithely from dawn until evening, producing as much as 341 Ibs. of good-quality steel a day. Last week, according to commune knowledge, the lady joined the workers in the garden, saying: "Making steel also tempers people." As vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, sister of Nationalist China's Madame Chiang Kaishek and widow of the founder of the Chinese Republic, she is an alloy herself--Madame Sun Yatsen.

. . .

"Eartha Kitt advanced her feline personality across the footlights," wrote a London critic, "offering songs full of menace and other unmentionable qualities and complaining I Wanna Be Evil, as if we did not know." Then, after the Royal Variety Performance, Eartha became a wide-eyed child in brief converse with Queen Elizabeth II.

. . .

White Supremacist John Kasper, 29, whose unpopularity in the North is exceeded only by his unpopularity in the South, was still a loser. Three months out of jail (for riot agitation in Clinton, Tenn. in 1956), rickety John was given a six-month stretch at Nashville's Davidson County Workhouse, after an all-male, all-white jury convicted him of riot agitation in 1957.

. . .

Richard George, 69, quit his night-shift job as a billing-machine operator in the Reader's Digest circulation fulfillment department, went back to England and his full identity: Richard Lloyd George, second Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, son of World War I Prime Minister David Lloyd George. When his father died in 1945, the new earl succeeded to the title but inherited nothing of the $300,000 estate, discomfitedly said: "If he was going to leave me the baby, he should have given me a perambulator to put it in." Home after ten years of self-exile, he set up temporary digs in an unheated room (built by his father for a farm employee) at Heather Cottage, Churt, Surrey, planned to scrape up a few guineas by turning up at the House of Lords, where peers in attendance get $8.40 a day.

. . .

Among the shards of her career as a Congresswoman was one smoldering chunk that Minnesota's 45-year-old Coya Knutson might have expected. Her vacillating husband, who supported her opponent in September's primary but threw his weight behind Democrat Coya before her defeat in last week's election (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), was bringing a $200,000 alienation-of-affections and slander suit against Billy Kjeldahl, 30, the lady's administrative assistant. Billy had not only "interfered" with his marital rights, charged 50-year-old Innkeeper Andy; he had also called the plaintiff "an impotent old alcoholic."

. . .

"It is like taking part in a piece of history,'' said William Urry, archivist to the Dean and Chapter Library at Canterbury, presenting one of the least convincing arguments on taxation since the days when square-riggers carried marked-up tea to Boston. Noting that the Canterbury city council makes an annual grant to the almshouses in the nearby village of Harbledown, Archivist Urry wondered why. The city treasurer hadn't the foggiest. So Urry peered down through history, found the grant's origin nearly 800 years deep. In 1170, his dreams darkened by the blood of Archbishop Thomas a Beckett, the conscience-stricken Henry II ordered the grant to the almshouses to be made in perpetuity. Hence, chirps Urry, "every time anyone living in the city of Canterbury pays his or her rates, he or she is contributing toward the penance made by Henry II" for murder in the cathedral.

. . .

The maleficent diamond that has legendarily brought sinister fate to its owners for 300 years last week became the property of everyone in the U.S. By registered mail (postage: 90-c-; registry charge: $151.85), the Hope Diamond went from Manhattan to the new Hall of Gems and Minerals in Washington's Smithsonian Institution. Donor: Harry Winston, the jeweler prince, who bought the $1,000,000-$2,000,000, steel blue, 44 1/2-carat purey from the estate of Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, famed capital hostess whose first son was killed by an automobile, whose daughter died from an overdose of sleeping pills, whose husband, onetime Washington Post Owner Edward B. McLean, died in a mental institution. Some previous owners: King Louis XIV, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, English Banker Henry Thomas Hope, and Subaya, favorite of Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid, who murdered her.

. . .

Working on a new novel called Lord Timothy Dexter Revisited, a guest known as Mr. Maynard kept his identity mostly secret on a ranch in Nevada's Washoe Valley. This week, his residence requirements satisfied, Mr. Maynard will have to make himself known in order to seek a divorce (after a second marriage that has lasted 21 years) as John Phillips Marquand. Meanwhile, the 65-year-old Maynard has found another love: Nevada. It "is the last frontier of the fiction writer. This is the place for a young writer to come. What this place needs is a mute and glorious Milton. If Mark Twain and Bret Harte were alive today, they could do it all over again. If I were 30 years younger . . ."

. . .

In Rome the bongo drums throbbed unnecessarily. Tuxedos dropped to the floor in homage. Blue-blooded Borgheses and warm-blooded entertainers stamped their feet, but hardly to get circulation going. Cinemelon Anita Ekberg had just slumped with exhaustion after dropping a shoulder strap in a loamy cha-cha-cha, and now a Turkish bellydancer was grinding away at Anita's challenge: "Let's see you do better." She did. With fundamental gesture--and no clothing save a pair of black lace panties--Haisch Nanah, 24, turned U.S. Socialite Peter Howard's birthday party for an Italian countess into haischish. Luckily, the poliziotti showed up before the 200 guests could succumb to Roman fever. Said the Vatican's L'Osservatort-Romano next day: "The lice of society."

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