Palm Beach's fabulous white marble Flagler Museum came back to life when some 425 very social guests attended the pinnacle event of Florida's winter season. The museum was once Whitehall Mansion, home of Oilman Henry Morrison Flagler, a Rockefeller partner who, before his death in 1913, almost singlehanded, transformed much of southern Florida from wasteland into alluring real estate. Built in 1902 at a cost of $2,500,00. Whitehall's 39 rooms include a cavernous (110 ft. by 40 ft.) tapestried main hall that once contained one of the largest Persian Kirmanshah rugs ever loomed. Other features: an Italian Renaissance library, a Louis XIV music room, a Louis XV ballroom, a Louis XVI grand salon, 16 guest rooms with decor ranging from Oriental to American Colonial. The Restoration Ball was held there last week to help raise some $2,000,000 for the museum's renovation. Among the luminaries on hand: Florida's Democratic Governor LeRoy Collins, Mrs. Ricardo C. Gonzales, a granddaughter of Flagler.

Making his pitch in This Week Magazine, aging (71) onetime New Dealer James Aloysius Farley, now board chairman of Coca-Cola Export Corp., unoriginally proposed: "Let's Put Our ex-Presidents in the Senate." Issuing a statement to garnish Farley's article, Octogenarian Herbert Hoover took a wryly negative stand: "I was in favor of giving former Presidents a seat in the Senate until I passed 75 years. Since then I have less taste for sitting on hard-bottomed chairs during long addresses."

Hollywood's opulent desert rats in the nearby oasis of Palm Springs paid tribute to "The King," grey-templed Cinemactor

Clark Gable, on his 59th birthday. Before the big party, Gable and handsome Fifth Wife Kay took a spin in her present to him, a well-upholstered electric golf cart.

Flashing the old indomitable smile that is rarely seen in the papers these days, former Senate Republican Leader William F. Knowland showed up at an apolitical love feast in Los Angeles, was embraced by none other than California's Democratic Governor Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown, who landslid over Knowland in the state's 1958 gubernatorial race. White House Hopeful Brown was there to pass out awards on behalf of the California Newspaper Publishers Association. He handed Bill Knowland, now the editorial panjandrum of the Knowland family-owned Oakland Tribune (circ. 208,198), the first-place plaque in the competition among dailies of over 100,000 circulation for the best coverage of women's interests.

Into the slightly tarnished Casino of Monte Carlo one evening shuffled Sir Winston Churchill, a sometime gambler spending a quiet vacation (on doctors' orders) in Monaco. At Sir Winston's side was Shipping Tycoon Aristotle Socrates Onassis, owner of 42% of the Casino's stock. Churchill bought a modest stack of light blue ($1) chips. After two hours devoted to the impassive scrutiny of a spinning roulette wheel and the cards in another game called trente et quarante, the two departed. Churchill was an estimated $35 richer, Onassis $15 poorer. Two afternoons later Sir Winston was back, this time wagering $10 and $20 chips at the games. It went well for him. Without a trace of a smile, he picked up about $300 in winnings and went his way.

Recipients of two National Institute of Arts and Letters gold medals, to be awarded in May: ailing Watercolorist

Charles E. Burchfield, 66; The New Yorker's distinguished Talk-of-the-Town-er E. B. (for Elwyn Brooks) White, 60.

Ill lay: sultry Actress France Nuyen, 20, title-roler in Broadway's long-running The World of Suzie Wong, suffering in London from general jitters and a throat infection that forced her to abandon the lead in the movie version of Suzie; Jack-of-All-Arts Noel Coward, 59, abed with phlebitis (inflammation of veins) in Les Avants, Switzerland; General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, 80, showing "gradual improvement" in a Manhattan hospital after being downed by a prostate gland infection (see MEDICINE); Mississippi's segregating Democratic Senator James O. Eastland, 55, laid up in Maryland's Bethesda Naval Hospital with a stubborn case of influenza; West Germany's Minister of the Economy Ludwig Erhard, who celebrated his 63rd birthday getting congratulated in bed while recovering from pneumonia contracted on his recent trip to Cairo.

One of New York City's most eminent senior citizens, Vienna-born Violinist Fritz Kreisler, proudly made his way to city hall, where on his 85th birthday he got a civic scroll for "distinguished and exceptional service" from Mayor Robert F. Wagner. Aside from composing such popular tunes as Romance and Caprice Viennois, Virtuoso Kreisler also "ghostwrote" a series of compositions that he ascribed to 17th and 18th century masters; years later he confessed that he had done so because "I found it inexpedient and tactless to repeat my name endlessly on the programs." During the city hall ceremony Kreisler, who played his first U.S. concert in 1888 and retired in 1950, turned to Wife Harriet, kissed her with the perfected affection accruing from 57 years of classically happy marriage.

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