"People are funny about telephones," mused Oilman J. Paul Getty, the world's richest American, now an expatriate at Sutton Place, his million-dollar Tudor mansion outside London. "They'll come as guests and make long-distance calls all over the world. Even a call to London costs one and three [18-c-]." Pounding a tight fist on the table, he recalled the attitude of the late William Randolph Hearst. "He didn't like people to use his telephone without telling him about it. Anyone who did that, whether staff or guest, found his luggage packed." That was going a little far, thought Getty, even while reiterating that "there should be discipline in money matters, as in all things." Last week the five-time divorced tycoon installed his own form of Sutton Place discipline: a pay phone. "The coin box," chuckled Billionaire Getty, "should take care of things."

Kicking off another busy week, Jacqueline Kennedy designated the nation's first curator of White House curios, also called on a woman with personal knowledge of the subject--Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, 88. The appointment of Mrs. John N. Pearce, 26, a Smithsonian Institution staffer, was announced from Palm Beach, where Jackie lent especial cachet to a dinner-dance assemblage of solid-gold socialites including Mrs. Winston Guest, Mrs. Earl E. T. Smith, Countess Mercedes de Bendern and Hostess Dawn Coleman (the President's replacement as escort: Brother-in-Law Peter Lawford). The First Lady, whose Southern trip was marred by reports of an abortive kidnap plot against Daughter Caroline, inevitably made further news with her Easter wardrobe selections. She appeared scarved, barelegged and besandaled at Good Friday services. For Sunday she had assembled her standard pillbox hat--in blue straw--and matching two-piece, silk-shantung dress. For breathless garment-industry tycoons tilting at windfalls, Jackie provided only one departure from the past: three-quarter-length sleeves.

John Hay Whitney, 56, had no sooner doffed his Homburg as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's than Senator Kenneth Keating tried to throw it in the ring for the New York City mayoralty. Thanking the upstate Republican for his kindness, Jock Whitney nonetheless thought he could do without "the leadership of this bedeviled city of ours," reported himself "committed to my responsibility as owner of the Herald Tribune." An also-run suggestion of Keating's was no more enticed by the $40,000 post. Said Banker David Rockefeller, 45, youngest of Governor Nelson Rockefeller's four brothers and a prewar City Hall aide: "From my work with Mayor La Guardia, I have an idea what the job is. Frankly, I feel very happy at the Chase Manhattan Bank."

New York Stock Exchange Board of Governors permitting, Ike's Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson, 50, next week will cut the U.S. unemployment count by one. New job of the sometime Canadian holding-company tycoon and Texas attorney: a limited partnership in the blue-chip Manhattan investment house of Carl M. Loeb, Rhoades & Co.

Back from London and her near fatal battle with double pneumonia, Cinemactress Elizabeth Taylor, 29, headed west for "a few months in the sun." Her left leg--much punctured from intravenous feedings, blood transfusions and antibiotic injections--was swathed in bandages, her tracheotomy wound covered by a high collar. Stoicized Liz: "I'll have my necklaces redesigned a little higher to cover up the scar--sort of diamond and pearl Band-Aids."

Gospel Singer Mahalia Jackson, 49, set off on a world concert tour, all astir over her first command performance--before Denmark's King Frederik IX in Copenhagen-and a scheduled audience with Pope John XXIII in Rome. Mahalia was even more anticipative about her subsequent pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Said the Baptist contralto: "That's the most important thing in my life--to walk the streets where our Lord once walked."

Grilled in a BBC interview about his first, pre-Hiroshima months as British Prime Minister, Lord Attlee, now 78, pleaded a layman's ignorance about the implications of the atomic bomb. "I'm no scientist, you know," he said. "I knew nothing about it except that it was a device of some kind to produce a very big explosion." Washington, Attlee insisted, had not kept him fully informed. "But," he added, sucking on his pipe, "that is a kind of post-mortem thought."

Shortly after leaving Gettysburg to unlimber on Palm Springs' Eldorado links, Dwight D. Eisenhower insisted that he hadn't "a plan beyond this next stroke." But the lure of the pen soon proved mightier than the mashie, and the war chronicler--whose 1948 Crusade in Europe sold 1,500,000 copies and earned him $635,000--promised an updater. Ike's subject: "My eight years in the presidency and the lessons I believe can be drawn therefrom."

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