A six-piece band played old Hungarian gypsy songs, and some 300 society sports quickly got into the spirit of things at the Imperial Room restaurant of Manhattan's Delmonico Ho tel. Owner S. Joseph Tankoos Jr. wants to build a new restaurant, so he threw a smashing party that fairly broke up the old joint. Actress Anita Louise specialized in throwing trays of glasses; Fashion Leader Mrs. Harcourt Amory wielded a sledge hammer on a 30-ft. red velvet-lined balustrade; Mrs. Jacob Javits timidly tossed just one champagne glass while her Senator husband looked on. But Mrs. Wellington Koo, sister-in-law of Chiang Kaishek, won the wreckers' honors. She took an ax to the wall, then to a chair and finally sank it in a sofa that the management had not even intended to destroy.

With the fight just three weeks away, Floyd Patterson, 28, is not brimming with overconfidence at his chances of regaining the Heavyweight Boxing crown. "I will not hit the ground/ In the first round,/ How does that sound?" he asked reporters. It sounded like soft Clay, but Sonny Listen, 29, didn't mind. "I like Patterson; I really do. I don't plan to let the fight go past three rounds." Besides, what Sonny is really interested in is getting at Cassius the Brassiest after he disposes of Floyd. He has his Las Vegas training camp fitted out with a slot machine that rings up the jackpot every time three heads of the Louisville Lip click into place.

"The only protection you have between you and your audience is your concentration," said Carroll Baker. So, concentrating mightily her first day on the set of Harold Robbins' sexaggerated The Carpetbaggers, Actress Baker, 32, emerged buff from the bath and slithered to her vanity table. Playing the role of Hollywood Goddess Rina Marlowe, Carroll felt only a bit unnatural au naturel during the scene's eight takes. Said she: "Nobody made any jokes. Everybody behaved just beautifully." Everybody in this case included a censor who will be on the set full time so as not to miss anything that he might want the rest of the world to.

President Kennedy will not be the first American layman to receive a private audience with Pope Paul VI. A Republican beat him to it: former Vice President Richard Nixon, 50, who is touring Europe and the Middle East with his family. The visit lasted half an hour, and Nixon, a Quaker, emerged greatly impressed with the new leader of Roman Catholicism. "He is decisive and original. He has a great understanding of world affairs." On the subject of formal U.S. relations with the Vatican, Nixon said that he "personally would like to see very close and continuing contact with the Vatican. If diplomatic ties were ever suggested, I would see no objection." And he added, to the sound of distant trumpets: "Of course, it would be much easier if a nonCatholic were President."

There went the made-in-gossip-columns engagement of Playboy Pitcher Bo Belinsky, 26, and Picture Playgirl Mamie Van Doren, 30. On payroll suspension from the Los Angeles Angels for refusing to report to their Hawaii farm team, Bo suddenly called the whole thing off. "Maybe he was jealous of my curves," sniffed Mamie. Maybe, but Belinsky was tossing strikes with Delaware's nifty Ricky D. E. du Pont, fortyish, widow of Millionaire Francis V. du Pont. Her new beau, she allows, is "a thorough gentleman." Bo says they are just friends, and adds that he is ready to play ball in Hawaii after all--unless he and Ricky decide to buy a nightclub together.

For General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, 83, memories came flooding back when the Philippine government presented him with a 30-lb. chunk of reddish granite. The stone was cut from the mouth of Corregidor's Malinta Tunnel, where in 1942 U.S. and Philippine troops held out for four months against Japanese forces. Said MacArthur, his eyes misty as he touched the souvenir: "Corregidor--a wartime rock --but in it, it holds the symbol of the honor of two great nations."

She is a countess who was born in a 19-room mansion. But now, as a U.S. citizen, she calls herself "Miss" and lives on a New York farm. For 24 years, Alexandra Tolstoy, 79, only living child of Russia's great novelist, has devoted her time to the care of anti-Communist refugees--and at her Tolstoy Foundation Center, near Nyack, is a group of Staroobriadtsi (Old Believers), survivors of a splinter sect of the Russian Orthodox Church whose members fled to Turkey from their homeland nearly 300 years ago. Miss Tolstoy enlisted the U.S. Government's aid in order to bring 224 of them over, and now hopes to help them set up a permanent community. "Think of all the rich people who have land they don't need," she says, "and they're paying taxes on it too."

All this talk about brains and dames in space is bunk, said Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper, 36, back for a home-town celebration in Shawnee, Okla. "If there had been a scientist on my flight, I don't think we would have gotten him back." As for the ladies, said Gordo, "to date there have been no women--and I say absolutely zero women--who have qualified to take part in our space program."

Remember those Shirley Temple movies where she was just sort of standing around when all of a sudden this producer comes running up and says, "I've auditioned 500 kids, and you're the perfect one. Sing something." Well, that's just how it happened to Sheri Bond, 7, a brunette, button-eyed tyke. She was at a special screening of a movie in Manhattan with her dancer mother when an assistant director of Meredith Willson's upcoming Here's Love, the stage version of Miracle on 34th Street, spotted her and knew she was just the one. Of course, she didn't know any songs; so they taught her Red, Red Robin, and now she's got a big part in the play. She looks like Shirley too.

His condition was grave, and doctors had almost given up hope. But Herbert Hoover, 88, was not ready to go. Suffering from anemia due to internal bleeding, he was being fed intravenously and had been receiving blood transfusions when his condition suddenly improved. His fever fell, his heart steadied, and his pulse returned to normal. Off the critical list for the first time in ten days, he asked for his pipe, lit it, and turned to his bedside nurse: "Well," he said, "we're back in business again."

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