With absolutely no visible prompting from her newly hired pressagent, Metropolitan Opera Mezzo-Soprano Rosalind Elias, 27, supposedly betook herself to Manhattan's Bowery where, for $5, she got herself tattooed with her name and social security number (023-22-9834). Alleged reason: "In this day of possible large-scale disaster, all of us should wear identification." Alleged site of identification: the lower abdomen. Explained the sultry singer, as her pressagent showed unconcealed delight: "I couldn't think of a more inconspicuous place."

Textile Tycoon Bernard Goldfine, 70, whose gift-giving ways forced the resignation of former New Hampshire Governor Sherman Adams as top assistant to Dwight Eisenhower in 1958, managed to land three more Government employees in hot water. Scarcely had the Boston industrialist been ensconced in Danbury, Conn., federal prison to begin a year-and-a-day stretch for tax evasion, when three of its staff--a janitor, a machinist and a cook--were suspended for helping him keep up illicit correspondence with friends on the outside. As for the gregarious Goldfine, he landed in "segregation," pending investigation of the alleged letter smuggling.

Greeted as "Lady Paulina Peeps" by a London magistrate trying her on a traffic charge, Lady Paulina Mary Louise Pepys, second daughter of the sixth Earl of Cottenham and a descendant of 17th century Diarist Samuel Pepys, shook lovers of English literature the world over with her reply. "Sorry," she snorted, "but it's 'Pepp-iss.' " Later, when admirers of her candid ancestor challenged her on the point, the 31-year-old London librarian insisted: "If he did call himself 'Peeps,' he was the first member of the family to do so and none has done it since." Asked for his ruling, Britain's leading Pepys authority, Sir Arthur Bryant, admitted that although he stuck by "Peeps," there was evidence (in the phonetic spellings of Pepys' contemporaries) supporting not only "Pepp-iss" but also "Paps" and "Papys."

Swinging onto the stage of the red-plush Teatro Nuovo for his operatic debut, a gangling, long-beaked American basso stirred his Milanese audience to excited whispers: "That's the son of Lolita." In fact, the new Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville could at best be ranked only as the fictional nymphet's half brother--the son of her creator, Novelist Vladimir Nabokov. But on his own merits, Harvard-educated Dmitri Nabokov, 27, a part-time mountain climber and amateur road racer, earned bravos from the discriminating Milanese gallery for his comic skill and the rich promise of his voice. Decided Father Nabokov judiciously as his Russian-born wife beamed approval: "I don't know yet whether Dmitri will ever be another Chaliapin, but I certainly think he has every chance of making a fine career."

Alarmed by the mounting wave of art thefts on both sides of the Atlantic, Novelist Somerset Maugham, 87, moved his collection of 46 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings out of his Riviera villa and into a Marseilles bank vault for the duration of a scheduled visit to Lon . Sighed Maugham's Man Friday, Secretary Alan Searle: "Art has become more of an anxiety than a pleasure now."

Noting that "hair styling is a key element of fashion for the first time since the days of the French courts," the tastemaking Coty American Fashion Critics' Awards committee broke 18-year precedent to anoint a coiffeur. The man of the hour at the solemn presentation ceremonies in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art: Mr. Kenneth (surname back home in Syracuse, N.Y.: Battelle), who was already famed as clippers and comb expert for Marilyn Monroe, Tina Onassis and Judy Garland, but who achieved the bouffant ("I like to call it uncontrived fullness") summit with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

After a fortnight in communion with nature in the Outer Mongolian wilderness, Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas, 62, deplaned in Moscow with a knapsack full of obiter dicta. Noting that the Ulan Bator intelligentsia is "starved for contact with the West" and that "the Russians are doing a wonderful public relations job for themselves" there, the outspoken jurist urged a U.S. counter-push, starting with instant diplomatic recognition.

Last May, when Jordan's impetuous King Hussein, 25, married 20-year-old Toni Gardiner, daughter of a British army officer, his subjects were so restive that Toni was pointedly denied the rank of Queen and no less pointedly given the Moslem name, Muna al Hussein ("Wish of Hussein"). Last week both Toni's popular standing and her eventual claim to a title appeared to be on the rise. The reason: a much-publicized court announcement that she is expecting a child early next spring.

At the Southern Governors' Conference in Nashville, where Tennessee's racially moderate Buford Ellington beat out Arkansas' diehard segregationist Orval Faubus for the chairmanship, a reporter asked South Carolina Governor Ernest Hollings how he felt about N.A.A.C.P. Special Counsel Thurgood Marshall's recent appointment as a federal judge. Replied Hollings resignedly: "I'm just glad Martin Luther King doesn't have a law degree."

From the high tragedy of a night in a London jail for his part in a ban-the-bomb demonstration, dyspeptic British Playwright John (The Entertainer) Osborne, 31, descended to low farce. Ostentatiously shunning his wife, Actress Mary Ure, who recently gave birth to a son while Osborne was off gallivanting on the Riviera, the dean of the Angry Young

Men busily set about furnishing his newly acquired country seat in Sussex. Among its ornaments: redheaded Socialite Penelope Gilliat, 29, a London cinema critic and wife of Neurologist Roger Gilliatt, the best man at Princess Margaret's wedding. In response to pointed questions from Fleet Street newshawks, Dramatist Osborne offered some uncharacteristically wooden dialogue: "It is true that Mrs. Gilliatt and I brought some of our belongings here over the weekend . . . Mrs. Gilliatt will be staying here with me for some time.''

In Waukegan, Ill., which already boasted Thomas Jefferson Junior High and Daniel Webster Junior High, the board of education this week will dedicate a third junior high school, named for still another illustrious figure out of the U.S. past: Jack Benny, 67. who dropped out of Waukegan High as a 16-year-old sophomore.

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