Into Houston to visit the new, $90-million Manned Spacecraft Center that will be their headquarters by 1964 wheeled the seven Mercury astronauts. By way of welcome, 150,000 Texans lined a 1 1/2-mile route as the seven--John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Walter Schirra, Alan Shepard, Virgil Grissom, Leroy Cooper and Donald Slayton--drove by with their families. To Walt Schirra, hundreds held up six fingers for the number of orbits he is to make in the next U.S. space flight. The parade led to the Sam Houston Coliseum for a neighborly cookout at which 1,500 chickens, 2,000 Ibs. of spareribs, 3,000 lbs. of beef were served up to 6,000 Space Center workers and their families. As the astronauts were given the traditional Texas totems--a ten-gallon sombrero and a gold reserve sheriff's badge--Ohio-born John Glenn got into the spirit of things by greeting people, "Howdy, podnuh."

Bound for Yale's Law School as a visiting lecturer is Child Psychoanalyst Anna Freud, 67, the only one of Sigmund Freud's six children to achieve eminence in the field he pioneered. Freud's youngest daughter and his favorite child, diminutive, Vienna-trained Anna was constantly with him during the last, cancer-ravaged years of his life, has directed London's Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic since 1938. At Yale, she will do research on family life and law and participate in seminars with select scholars during the spring terms of 1963 and 1964.

As out-of-town tryouts go, it was way, way out. By coastal steamer, narrow-gauge railway and bus, Comedian Bert Lahr, 66, and a Broadway cast trekked up to Dawson City in the Yukon--4,700 miles from the Great White Way--for an eight-week run of Foxy, a Gold Rush version of Ben Jonson's Volpone. The musical comedy, timed to premiere with the beginning of Dawson City's Gold Rush Festival, launched the event with a splash. At the Palace Grand Theater, where Douglas Fairbanks Sr. once played to Klondike sourdoughs, British Comedienne Bea Lillie officially opened the festival, later joined an 18-carat audience to give the troupe a wild standing ovation. "It was tremendous," said Lahr. But the critics thought that the nugget needed some polishing. Said the Chicago Sun-Times, which sent a Canadian-born reporter up to cover the event: "It might be fool's gold for Broadway purposes."

When Rembrandt's St. Bartholomew was sold at Sotheby's fortnight ago for $532,000--fifth highest auction price ever paid for a painting--the buyer was Agnew's, a London art firm. But Agnew's was merely acting for Oilman J. Paul Getty, 69, who let it slip last week that he now had the masterpiece hanging in his Sutton Place mansion outside London.

In Denmark for a five-day visit, Richard Nixon squired Pat through Copenhagen's dazzling Tivoli Gardens, careened around in a "dodgem" car there, and toured Hamlet's Kronborg Castle in Elsinore. Then he headed up to Rebild National Park in Jutland to keynote the annual Independence Day Festival there. Speaking before an audience of 40,000 in Rebild's natural amphitheater, the former Vice President drew cheers with an appeal for strength and unity in the face of Communism. Scarcely had he finished speak ing than tragedy struck one of the men who shared the platform with him. Softspoken, white-haired Henry R. Henius, 78, son of Dr. Max Henius, a Danish-born biochemist who founded the festival in 1912 to promote Danish-U.S. friendship, gripped the hand of a bishop's wife near him, gasped "Goodbye," and pitched forward. Within minutes he was dead of a heart attack.

"Ah, a new jazz fan, I believe," grinned touring Bandleader Benny Goodman, as he shook hands with another guest at the U.S. Embassy's Fourth of July reception in Moscow. But Benny dug the wrong cat. Arching his back, Nikita Khrushchev replied: "No, I don't like Goodman music. I like good music." All jazz started off "boo-boo-boo-boo-boo," complained the Soviet Premier, setting it to his own clopping time by dancing a jig on the front lawn of Spaso House. Russian or American, it was all Chinese to him, and so was that other whatchamacallit, abstract art. Amateur Painter Dwight Eisenhower once told him that modern art "makes me sick to the stomach," and Nikita bobbed his head approvingly: "It's the same with me."

In Show magazine, seamed old Story teller W. Somerset Maugham, 88, broke a long silence on his only marriage -- an eleven-year affair with Interior Decorator Syrie Wellcome. As Maugham tells it in Looking Back, it was a painful episode. Married in New Jersey in 1916 after a two-year love affair -- and a year after Syrie bore him a girl, their only child --they hit it off miserably. He found marriage a kind of human bondage, soon was demanding the right "to go and come when I liked." She took two lovers-- "I knew them both and had a very poor opinion of either," sniffed Maugham --and eventually got a French divorce in 1927. Maugham saw her only a few more times before she died in 1955 at 76, but lately he has been hearing from his daughter Elizabeth. Two months ago, she sued him for $648,900 for selling nine paintings that she claimed belonged to her.

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