While their husbands were hurrying around Chicago at top political speed attending to sterner G.O.P. Convention affairs, the wives of eleven Republican bigwigs, plus the daughter of a twelfth, climbed into fancy period gowns for a "Great Ladies" lunch at the Conrad Hil ton Hotel. Guests of honor at the costume party were Mamie Eisenhower, who saw herself impersonated, and Pat Nixon, who could dream that she would join the roster of the dozen Republican First Ladies whose inaugural finery was reproduced for the occasion.

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, 56, director of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, has not worked for the Federal Government since 1954, when he was branded a "potential security risk" and discharged as a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission. But his standing with the United Nations has apparently not suffered. Last week Oppenheimer, a prime architect of the Abomb, a conscientious objector to the H-bomb, was confirmed as the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency's official representative to the forthcoming Tenth Annual High Energy Physics Conference. The man who appointed him: the U.N. agency's director-general, W. Sterling Cole, onetime G.O.P. Representative and a congressional overseer of the Atomic Energy Commission at the time of Dr. Oppenheimer's tribulations.

Upon arriving at her summer villa near Parma, the Metropolitan Opera's latest girl wonder, pretty, Pennsylvania-born Soprano Anna Moffo, was asked by a spokesman for several Italian opera companies to restrain the Italian press from swooning in print over "L'Esotica's" glamorous charms--the home-grown prima donnas are hitting high "C with jealousy. But Anna only shrugged: "Who ever heard of telling the press what to say? I'm not in the business of smoothing the ruffled feathers of other divas! Opera is a dog-eat-dog business!"

Into the forbidding portals of the Soviet embassy in Washington last week walked a tired-faced women, Barbara Powers, 24, wife of ill-fated U-2 Pilot Francis Powers, who will be tried this month in Moscow for espionage. When Barbara emerged, she looked tireder still. She had been hoping for some word on her request for a Soviet visa. But "three third secretaries" had told her that they had heard nothing from Moscow. Said she despondently, "His letters have such an air of sadness--as though he is just doomed." At week's end, Barbara, through her lawyer, cabled a personal plea to Nikita Khrushchev.

When A. & P. Heir Huntington Hartford offered to build an $862,500 Parisian-style sidewalk cafe and pavilion in Manhattan's Central Park as a gift to the city, he might just as well have proposed a boiler factory for all the protesting cries it aroused. Moaning about this "unwarranted invasion," a curious assortment of allies, ranging from Funnyman Henry Morgan ("Anybody who chops down one tree ought to be executed") to the Fifth Avenue Association and Tiffany & Co., which brought a still pending court suit, apparently on the theory that soda sipping is bad for the diamond business, joined forces to get the pavilion stopped. About the only ones pleased with the idea, aside from the millions who might enjoy an inexpensive cafe in the park, were New York's city fathers. Last week, after a short session of the Board of Estimate, Park Commissioner Newbold Morris thanked Donor Hartford kindly and accepted the gift.

Arriving in Hollywood to collaborate with top-ranking Director George Stevens on a movie version of the life of Christ, snow-capped Poet Carl Sandburg, 82, was in an exuberant mood over his maiden effort in cinema. Some time Guitar Strummer Sandburg already has some ideas about a theme song for the four Evangelists:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John Stop that train till I get on O my way, my way, my way My way seems so hard.

The New York Yankees' flinty Manager Casey Stengel got rained out of a big salute planned in Yankee Stadium for his 70th birthday. So he retired to the catacombs of Yankee Stadium for a slice of birthday cake and a stroll down memory lane instead, fondly remembering the day in the 1920s when he and some other big leaguers met Britain's King George V. Each player, upon being introduced to His Highness, was told to say: "I'm honored." The first few players carried off their lines perfectly. But not brash Casey Stengel. "When the King gets to me," said old Case, "I look right at him, raise my voice a little and say, 'You're honored.' He never batted an eye. Maybe he felt honored, at that."

From the first word that a gilded aluminum eagle, its outspread wings spanning 35 ft., was to be perched atop the new five-story U.S. embassy in ever-so-British Grosvenor Square, Londoners were all argument and bird calls of their own. "Blatant monstrosity," cried an M.P. Echoed London's Daily Telegraph: "An element of vulgarity." But by last week, when the fierce Yankee bird was hoisted into place, most of the locals allowed that they would probably learn to live with it, though they may still prefer pigeons. A few were even inclined to agree with the embassy's renowned Architect Eero Saarinen, who had tried to calm their earlier qualms with a somewhat technical reassurance: "The eagle will provide a vertical reference point in an otherwise horizontal facade."

Aging Groaner Bing Crosby, 56, never to be mistaken for a woolly-headed aborigine, is still something of a national figure in Australia, though he has never traveled Down Under. But Bing was less a mystery voice in Sydney last week after his brother, Orchestra Leader Bob Crosby, 46, got to reminiscing about the Crosby clan. Actually, said Bob, "I was 14 before I knew Bing was my brother and not my father." Why had Bing not come to Australia for a hero's welcome? "He'll never visit Australia until they put planes on tracks. He's just afraid of heights." Does Bob, in the style of Bing's four grown sons, ever quarrel with Bing? "What! Fight with the Bank of America?"

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