A white demigoddess to servants on her Kenya coffee plantation, Danish-born Baroness Karen Blixen once beat back two lions with a bull whip, earned the affectionate appellation "Honorable Lioness." But in 1931, when the coffee market crumbled, she returned to her native land, assumed a name now known and respected throughout the literary world--Isak Dinesen. Last week at 75, the wispy (her weight: 70 lbs.) writer was honored with a statue of herself by California Sculptor Emile Norman. Depicting a wraithlike priestess with a lion and a bird, the work evoked the pre-Mau Mau Kenya that Isak Dinesen cannot forget. It was, as described in her latest book, Shadows on the Grass (TIME, Jan. 6), a country where "the white pioneers lived in guileless harmony with the children of the land." Following a three-month stretch for contempt of court and two months of treatment in three mental institutions, Textile Tycoon Bernard Goldfine, 70, was ruled mentally competent to stand trial on charges of evading $791,745 in federal income taxes. Noting that the industrialist had managed to conduct business operations from one of the institutions and had "bribed hospital attendants to send telegrams," a U.S. judge found the gift-bearing crony of ex-Presidential Aide Sherman Adams currently free of hallucinations and suicidal inclinations. The court's only concern about Goldfine was his "moderate loss of memory and a tendency ... to ramble, which can be cured by prodding."

Believing that "geniuses must have privacy, for they are the ones who make the world progress," retired Danish Industrialist Axel Faber, 66, has decided to establish 100 homes of "rest and seclusion for the cream of humanity." To date, he has sanctuaries available in Japan, France, England, Austria, Italy, Brazil and Mexico. One of them, a luxurious, palm-shaded home on Mexico's Acapulco Bay, has already been christened by greatness. Faber's first guest genius: honeymooning Nobel Prizewinning Physicist Donald Glaser, 34, and his 23-year-old bride.

Awaiting trial on a charge of stabbing his wife, Author Norman (The Naked and the Dead) Mailer was earning bail money last week with a reading at Manhattan's 92nd Street Young Men's Hebrew Association. After polishing off some prose, he turned to verse with a warning that there would be language that "other people call obscene." Several short works and four-letter words later, Mailer leaped into his "transitions":

I was hysterical

said the girl.

I dropped my

goddamn

contact

lens

down

the

drain . . .

There was more, but "Y" Educational Director William Kolodney dropped the curtain on Mailer, labeled the performance "a raw recital of filth." Cried Mailer: "An administrator is no judge of literature." Eagerly concurring, Kolodney noted that he had not been judging literature.

Having already probed the progress and poverty of U.S. secondary education in a massive four-year study, Harvard President Emeritus James Bryant Conant, 67, last week received a $300,000 Carnegie Corporation grant for his next project: a two-year survey of teacher recruitment and training. Planning to canvass 1,000 education schools while delving into the quicksand area o-teacher certification, Conant hopes that his report will "quiet somewhat the discord in the field."

In his 2 1/2 years as music director of the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, 42, has suffered some critical lumps (too much globetrotting, excessive body English on the podium), but ticket sales have been the highest in history. Last week the grateful symphony expressed its appreciation by giving the versatile virtuoso a new seven-year contract--its longest since the turn of the century.

"I have never really believed I was Archbishop of Canterbury," began Dr. Geoffrey Fisher, 73, who has held the office since 1945, as he addressed his final meeting of the Anglican Assembly; "that is why I have enjoyed it as much as I have." Then, touched by the 40-minute eulogy-filled farewell of his colleagues, the retiring primate continued his uncommon burst of self-revelation: "I have asked myself once or twice lately what was my natural bent. I have no doubt at all: it is to look at each day for the evil of that day and have a go at it, and that is why I have never failed to have an acute interest in each morning's letters. That may surprise some of you, but it is precisely because I expect to find in them rows of evil that I have to attack somehow. I have begun to lose interest in the morning's post, and I take that as one reason why I should resign."

Appearing before the Senate Commerce Committee prior to his confirmation as chairman of the FCC, Chicago Lawyer Newton N. Minow, 35, enunciated a television creed to build a dream on: "I will work toward more wide-open spaces between the westerns and more public affairs instead of private eyes."

"See the great China (pronounced Chee-nah) model fashion's new couture-inspired designs that you can sew yourself," cried the six-column newspaper ad for Macy's 1961 Spring Fabric Fashion Show. "Whether or not," continued the pitch, "you're an aficionado who adores China's rhythmical stroll along fashion's illustrious runways, you must come see her . . ." What made the invitation ir resistible was the accompanying portrait of "the great China," a model of ex quisitely earthy elegance -- who makes her own clothes. Born in Shanghai of a Portuguese father and a Siamese mother, China Machado, now 25, worked her way around the world as a Pan Am stewardess and cinemactress, became the top mannequin for Givenchy in Paris at age 21. Also modeling for Simonetta, Fabiani and Balenciaga, she was finally coaxed to the U.S. in 1958 by Oleg Cassini. But for all her experience on haute couture's most exalted runways, last week's star billing at Macy's left China all but speechless in each of her seven languages. As yet unaccustomed to the merchandising methods of the miracle workers of 34th Street, she shuddered, "It sounds a little like a circus."

In Salt Lake City on a lecture junket, Boxer-turned-Restaurateur Jack Dempsey, 65, was routed from his bed by a fire at the Mormon Church-owned Hotel Utah. Evacuating his wife Deanna, said the former heavyweight champion, was one of the toughest fights of his career. "I guess she's like all women," shrugged Jack, who has been married four times. "She didn't want to leave the room without fixing her face." In Manhattan, where he will receive his master's degree in business administration from Columbia University next week, Captain Yehiel Aronowicz, 37, doughty onetime master of the blockade-running Israeli refugee ship Exodus, reported some reservations back home about the bestselling (4,000,000 copies to date) novel inspired by his 1947 heroics. "Israelis," he said, "were pretty disappointed in the book, to put it lightly. The types that are described in it never existed in Israel. The novel is neither history nor literature." From his literary lair in Encino, Calif., Exodus Author Leon Uris rebutted: "You may quote me as saying, 'Captain who?' and that's all I have to say. I'm not going to pick on a lightweight. Just look at my sales figures."

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