Outside of the royal family, the only person in the British Commonwealth who rates being addressed as Her Majesty is Salote, the 6-ft. 3-in., 280-lb. Queen of the Tonga. Last week Her Majesty, 60, winged in from her Polynesian archipelago to Sydney, Australia, to have a historical ball in that city's famed Cape Mitchell Library. Her scholarly project was to fill in the gaps in Tonga's archives. She pored over papers dating back to 1797, examined the journals of Circumnavigator James Cook, who first saw Tonga in 1773, duly noted that Explorer Abel Tasman, discoverer of Tasmania, had paid a visit to Tonga way back in 1643. Fascinated, the Queen is now undecided as to whether the royal treasury would be strained more by the cost of microfilming the records in Australia or by dispatching a scholar to Sydney for a year's work.

When Cuba's ousted Dictator Fulgencio Batista, supposedly foresightedly, put up $82,500 in 1957 for a large pink stucco hacienda in Daytona Beach, Fla., many of the locals began speculating about what sort of effect he might have, as a neighbor, upon real estate values. After Batista fled Cuba on New Year's Day, 1959, he wound up in the Madeira Islands, where most of his household has since joined him. Batista has apparently given up hopes of taking up exile in the U.S. soon. Said his secretary: "You can be sure he's trying to sell the house. He told me so."

Seventy-three years have passed since a young teacher in Alabama held her little pupil's hand under a flowing pump spout and manually spelled out the word "water" upon the palm of blind, deaf Helen Keller. Last week Miss Keller, almost 80, went to Radcliffe College for the in formal dedication of the Anne Sullivan Memorial Fountain, which flows in the Helen Keller Garden that was presented to her at the 50th reunion of her class ('04). Before feeling the water, Miss Kel ler smiled mistily, read a Braille inscrip tion at the back of the fountain: "In memory of Anne Sullivan, teacher extraordinary, who beginning with the word, water, opened to the girl Helen Keller the world of sight and sound through touch."

After a month of occasional running in the U.S., Australia's shaggy-maned Herb Elliott, 22, world's fastest miler (3:54.5), flew back Down Under and got his first haircut since he had left. It cost him 56-c- for a "back and sides" job in a Syd ney barbershop. Explained economy-minded Elliott: "Why pay $2 in the States for a five-bob haircut?"

Announcing their comebacks after long retirements : two fiftyish former cinema stalwarts -- Anna May Wong, 53, who quit the screen 17 years ago after count less mystery women roles in Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan easterns; and Leni Riefenstahl, 53, German film star of the 1930s, called by Hitler "the perfect ex ample of German womanhood," who will redirect a remake of a movie in which she once starred, The Blue Light.

The first woman to fly at the speed of sound, Aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran, 54, wanted to be the first to travel at twice the speed of sound. But she had to wangle her chance. Last April, Jackie visited a North American Aviation Inc. plant in Columbus, expressed a hankering to ride in an A3-J Vigilante, a Navy fighter-bomber now being tested. She soon learned that UPI the line of would-be passengers, including several admirals, formed to the right. Last week, after turning her persuasive talents on some top Pentagon brass, Jackie climbed into the rear cockpit of a Vigilante, was off for a 57-minute run during which the plane hit a speed of Mach 2.2. Upon landing, Passenger Cochran allowed: "I think I could fly it myself, after a checkout."

Several years after he won four gold medals in Hitler's Berlin in the 1936 Olympic Games, lightning-legged Track Whiz Jesse Owens lent them to a Harlem exposition that was celebrating the Negroes' advancement in the U.S. He never saw them again; they were either lost or stolen in the return mail, uninsured. Recently Owens, now a 46-year-old grandfather, mentioned his loss to an American Olympic Committee member, who wrote to Karl Ritter von Halt, head of the German National Olympic Committee. Von Halt acted quickly, had four exact duplicate medals struck off, had them relayed to Owens in Chicago, refused to hear of being reimbursed for them. Owens, who works for the Illinois Youth Commission, was touched by Von Halt's gesture: "It's hard to put it into words. I had a hell of a time writing that letter of thanks."

Reported the London Daily Telegraph's Columnist Peter Simple in a real-as-life spoof of a famed Briton just back from a glowingly uncritical trip to Red China: "Field Marshal Lord Montgomery has just returned from a flying visit to Hell. His impressions were as follows: 'I liked Hell very much. It is a good show, a very good show indeed. The Devil is a very sound chap and an able organizer. We had excellent talks. He has everything well under control. Discipline and administration are excellent. All the chaps I met there were warm, happy, fit and well in the picture. I promised the Devil that I would tell everybody what a good show Hell was. This I shall do.' "

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