Italian Cinemelon Sophia Loren, 27, had her day in court on two continents. In Rome, her fond discoverer, Producer Carlo Ponti, was racing to annul their marriage before they could be booked for bigamy (Italy does not recognize Ponti's divorce from his first wife). In New York Supreme Court, where Sophia was suing Bronston Productions, Inc. because she was billed below Charlton Heston on a Broadway sign ballyhooing El Cid. Justice Samuel Hofstadter chucked out her requested injunction. Said he: "Such vanity doubtless is due to the adulation which the public showers on the denizens of the entertainment world in a profusion wholly disproportionate to the intrinsic contribution which they make to the scheme of things."

Into Alabama's political ring once again went the wool hat of James E. ("Kissin' Jim") Folsom, 53, a favorite to win the Democratic gubernatorial primary--and with it an unprecedented third term in a state where the Governor cannot succeed himself. After idling away his latest interregnum selling insurance in the hinterlands, 6-ft. 8-in. Folsom faced only one real stumbling block: a redneck notion that he is soft on segregation because he once sipped Scotch with Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell in the executive mansion.

Into Vevey, Switzerland, for the wedding of Bulgaria's ex-King Simeon, 24, to a Spanish banking heiress, bounced Egypt's suety ex-King Farouk, 41, accompanied by second daughter Princess Fawzia, 21. Europe's reigning royalty was conspicuously absent, but 180 lesser bloods crammed into the small Russian Orthodox chapel, where only three seats were set up--for the three onetime monarchs among them. While Bulgaria's ex-Queen loanna and Albania's ex-Queen Geraldine democratically declined to use theirs, Farouk sat down in lonely, perspiring splendor.

As Violetta in La Traviata, Soprano Dorothy Kirsten, the first American ever to sing with Russia's 110-year-old Tiflis Opera, earned a shower of bouquets, 22 curtain calls and an enraptured chain of escorts all the way back to her hotel. (Ardent Georgians shouted in English: "May I kiss you?") Saving her voice for the remainder of a month-long Soviet tour, Miss Kirsten was later cajoled into a command demonstration of the twist. Said she: "The entire party applauded ecstatically. American culture has triumphed again."

From Boston came the last begorra of the late James Michael Curley, sometime mayor, Governor and U.S. Congressman. Although often accused of sticky fingers and once imprisoned for five months on conviction of mail fraud, Curley--according to an accounting of his will filed last week--left a net estate of only $3,769.

Though cashiered as the Dominican Republic's "Inspector of Embassies," Playboy Plenipotentiary Porfirio Rubirosa, 53, was still making patriotic noises in Paris. "The only trouble," explained the five-times-married,* sometime foreign corespondent, "is my appalling reputation as a seducer. To help destroy it, I am going to write a regular column on politics and economics for a very serious American publication [which he declined to name]. I may also write my memoirs. These will show that I was not always as frivolous as I was made to appear." Would Rubi miss the legend? "A little, of course, but what can one do? One must choose, and I have chosen to dedicate myself to the well-being of my Republic."

Whatever twisting bobby-soxers might think, Pianist Wladziu Liberace was still laughing all the way to the bank with claimed annual earnings of $1,000,000. Among his latest trinkets: a Hollywood Hills mansion previously owned by Cinemantiques Ann Harding and Rudy Vallee; Liberace has spent $175,000 changing the "Early Gloria Swanson" decor into Sunset Strip Versailles, heavily painted with gold ("my favorite color"). Among the conspicuous signs of his gilt complex: carpeting so thick that high-heeled guests are given slippers at the door for their own protection.

Not long after he returned with praise for and from Red China, Britain's wandering Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, 74, was cozying up to some other friends. At Cape Town, in the domain of Prime Minister Verwoerd and apartheid, the viscount proclaimed that "more has been done for the black African in South Africa than anywhere else in Africa, or in the world for that matter." Next stop for Perfect Guest Monty: Cuba.

Better known as a deadeye huntress and fancier of the Ferrari, Belgium's Princess Liliane, 45, wife of ex-King Leopold, has also been a generous patron of progress in cardiovascular surgery and a keen student of the subject (notably since 1957, when her son, Prince Alexandre, now 19, underwent a heart operation). But last week, having earlier donned mask and gown at Houston's Texas Medical Center to witness her 64th operation, she bowed to Leopold's interests and matched herself against the clean precision of another Texas host, Golfer Ben Hogan.

* To the late Generalissimo Trujillo's daughter Flor de Oro, Bankrollers Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke, French Actresses Danielle Darrieux and Odile Rodin, his current wife.

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