Sweeping around West Germany on a four-city concert tour. Soprano Maria Callas, 38, was guilty of not one prima donnybrook, seemed to be newly tranquilized. Though an eye inflammation bedded her down for a day in a Bonn hospital, she gamely went on with the show the next evening, restrained her storied temper even when flashbulbs popped during performances. Cooed her concert agent: "Maria has changed completely. She is a charming, amiable, friendly woman now."

The sourest chords in the grapefruit league were being struck by sometime Yankee Superstar Roger Moris, 27, who had yet to hit his first homer of the spring. After months of bouncing profitably around the banquet circuit, complaining about the food, and embarrassing his hosts with curt, monosyllabic speeches, Maris last week: dismissed young autograph seekers by signing programs with an X, announced a new policy of "no interview" to sportswriters, cursed out and threatened to slug U.P.I. Columnist Oscar Fraley, refused to pose for a photograph with Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby. Said TV's longtime "Voice of the Yankees" Mel Allen: "Maris has a lot to learn about warmth, appreciation, graciousness, and that sort of thing"

In Columbus, Ohio, hometown of that late and great satirist, ground was broken for the James Thurber shopping center and apartment development. Lest his fans think the whole idea was laughable, his widow said solemnly, "It is especially good that his name is connected with something growing--that is what he would appreciate more than anything else."

That grand slammer, Sammy Snead, 49, boasts the most naturally graceful swing in big-time golf, and last week he proved that he also has the most relaxed crouch. Retrieving his ball from the scraggly rough at Miami's Doral Country Club, he resembled nothing more than a praying mantis at bay. After which he slapped his next shot spang on the green, went on to pick up $700 in the pro-am prelude to the Miami open invitational.

Shortly after the Duke of Windsor, 67, threatened to sue on charges of invasion of privacy, WNBC-TV's scheduled 30-minute Biography of the Duke and his merry wife was scrubbed by the sponsor. Likely reason for the Duke's move: fear that the show might take some of the patina off A King's Story, a 26-episode series of privacy invasions that he has sold to an outside producer.

In another week of disappointment for marital deathwatchers anticipating the Roman springing of Mrs. Fisher, Liz's on-screen Caesar, Rex Harrison, 54, produced cheerier connubial copy. Two and a half years after the death of Third Wife Kay Kendall, he was wed at Genoa's city hall to Welsh Actress Rachel (Satur day Night and Sunday Morning) Roberts, 34, the Baptist minister's daughter who lately has been Rexy's favored traveling companion.

A year and a half after sometime Soviet U.N. Delegate Nikita Khrushchev--put his shoe back on and heeled from Manhattan to Moscow, the New York City police department was still seeking payment for the extraordinary costs of bodyguarding him and other top Reds. Predictably, the tab went to Washington. Last week the House Rules Committee cleared a $3,063,500 appropriation for New York City's finest--but not before Committee Chairman Howard Smith of Virginia expressed his Southern discomfort to the bill's sponsor, Brooklyn Democrat Edna Kelly. Snorted Smith: "Did you come here because the U.N. is broke? Well, we're broke, too."

Carrying home the National Book Award that he won for his first novel, Alabama-born Walker (The Moviegoer) Percy, 45, had at least one answer last week for bibliophiles who wonder why so many U.S. novelists and playwrights grow out of Southern soil. A lot of fertilizer was provided at Appomattox, said he. "We got beat; that's the main thing. It led to a great deal of productive tension."Just after the military junta in Seoul vetoed his plan to return from Hawaiian exile, South Korea's ex-President Syngman Rhee, 87, suffered another setback to his failing health. Partially blind, though as headstrong as ever, the prideful father of Korean independence was admitted to the U.S.'s Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu for treatment of "a nervous upset" that gave him "intermittent difficulties in talking and orienting himself." Unimpressed by Rhee's conciliatory admission that "there no doubt have been areas in which I might have done more for the betterment of my country" tne present Korean rulers intend to keep him out--if only because they fear that he would receive a hero's welcome.

Not even nine fulltime secretaries at Virginia's Langley Air Force Base could keep up with the tide of fan mail washing up for John Glenn, and postmen were feeling the strain. The letters, packages and cards mounted to 30,000; among them were offers to stamp his name on everything from orchids to bridges, requests for advice on how to become an astronaut, and one child's 4-c- contribution "to help pay the way for manned space flight." Like all cash gifts, it will go to charity.

After restlessly playing nothing but the palace since her marriage to Monaco's Prince Rainier, Princess Grace, 32. last week ended her six-year cinema caesura, contracted to play a compulsive thief in Alfred Hitchcock's Mamie. Why was she returning to the Hollywood scene? Said Her Grace, whose old movies are not shown publicly in Monaco: "With the profit from this film, I want to endow a fund for needy Monegasque children." In Massachusetts, where politics is a family business, still another hallowed name was dropped into contention for the U.S. Senate seat that is already being vied for by a Kennedy, a McCormack and a Lodge. Newest entry: lanky Harvard His tory Professor H. (for Henry) Stuart Hughes, 45, a grandson of the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who narrowly lost the presidency to Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

Young Hughes, a lifelong Democrat, will run as an independent on a disarmament and ban-the-bomb platform.

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