High ho, yodeled Robert Strange McNamara, 48, as he dusted off his trusty crampons, eased himself into his climbing knickers, and prepared to melt some solid Pentagon flesh in an assault on the 14,701-ft. Matterhorn. With his son Robert Craig, 14, and a dauntless Yank quintet whom Swiss whiz kids tagged "McNamara's Band," the Defense Secretary slogged up to within 2,000 ft. of the summit, where a 2-ft. snowfall programmed the computers to say no go. Back to base camp, men.

. . .

At the Red Cross charity gala in Monte Carlo, such celebrities as the Begum Aga Khan and Cinemactor David Niven were nicely sprinkled amidst 1,000 unknowns who paid $75 to dance and watch the Bluebell Girls of Paris prance. To the sprinkle, helas, was added a spatter and then a downpour. The Prince looked a trifle Rainier than usual, but Princess Grace, 34, remained smilingly in place to the end of the show. Noblesse was scarcely obliged to make so gracious a gesture--what with a third addition to the royal family due in Monaco next February.

His Manhattan apartment on East 66th Street is being renovated, and as Bernard Baruch held court for reporters on his 94th birthday, it seemed like a sound investment. He quit shooting quail two years ago ("I couldn't keep up with the dogs, the birds or the people"), but he still looks hale and hearty, swims two or three times a week, and recently ankled out to inspect the World's Fair. Mighty quick on the uptake, too. When a young newsman asked the crony of Presidents and Prime Ministers whom he considered the greatest man of his age, Baruch barked: "The fellow who does his job every day. The mother who has children and gets breakfast. The fellow who keeps the streets clean. The Unknown Soldier. Millions of men."

From her summer home in the Adirondacks, Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post Close Mutton Davies May, 77, heiress to the $100 million Post Toasties fortune, let it be known that she has been separated for "several months" from her fourth husband, Pittsburgh Industrialist Herbert May, 72, whom she married in 1958.

After Happy Rockefeller, 38, won an Idaho divorce last year from her first husband, Dr. James S. Murphy, 41, both refused to say who had won custody of their children: James, 13, Margaretta, 11, Carol, 8, and Malinda, 4. Governor Rockefeller's lawyers implied that some sort of joint custody had been worked out, but shortly after the Republican Convention, Mrs. Rockefeller brought the truth into the open by filing suit to get the children back. Her petition stated that Murphy had custody originally--and now she has won the first round in her battle to reverse the award. A White Plains, N.Y., judge overruled Murphy's plea to dismiss the case, instead scheduled it for trial--in chambers--on Sept. 2.

In Washington, paying a rare honor to a foreign figure, Mrs. Thomas C. Mann, wife of the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, christened the U.S.'s newest polaris sub U.S.S. Simon Bolivar, after South America's great 19th century liberator.

Now is the time for all gentlewomen to be of aid with a party. So Charlotte Ford, 22, Henry's girl, sacrificed the lawn of her mother's 22-room Long Island manse, Fordune, to a barbeque for some 2,000 "Young Citizens for Johnson," such as Lynda Bird, 20, Cinemactor Paul Newman, 39, Playwright Truman Capote, 39, A. & Peer Huntington Hartford, 53, Novelist John Steinbeck, 62, plus gaggles of her own Southampton playmates, goggles of interlopers from Manhattan, and gargoyles of Pucci-clad locals who drifted in from the beach to avoid the $15 tab. Not to be fordone by Fordune, Mrs. Winston ("Ceezee") Guest, 44, volunteered her 150-acre North Shore estate, Templeton, for a rally for Republican Candidate William Miller. Nothing stronger than iced tea was served to the 3,000 neighbors who dropped by, but Ceezee did her bit to improve G.O.P. relations with newsmen. "Pour la presse, Jean," she told her bartender. "Pas pour les autres."

They travel in separate planes "for precautionary reasons," even though former New York Deb Hope Cooke, 23, is now Queen for a deity, Sikkim's Palden Thondup Namgyal, 40, who is revered by his 162,000 Himalayan subjects as the reincarnation of a lama. The Maharani, in native gown and raw silk cloak, was first to land in New York last week with her six-month-old son, Prince Palden, and Crown Prince Tenzing, 12, child of an earlier marriage of the Maharajah. She was taking her boy to see her American aunt, she said, in keeping with an old Sikkimese custom of "visiting the wife's relations with the first-born as soon as possible." The mysterious Occident is what the Maharajah digs, however, and so does his other son, Prince Topgyal Wangchuk, 11. One of the boy's dearest possessions, beamed Pa when they touched down next day, is a Wild West-style gun and holster.

. . .

Saying "We fled for our god-damned lives," Baltimore Atheist Madalyn Murray, 45, jumped bail with her family in June, and flew to Hawaii in the wake of a Pier 6 brawl with the cops after her son married a 17-year-old over the protests of the girl's parents. At the time, Maryland seemed only too glad to be rid of her, but now it has changed its mind, and a Honolulu judge has ordered her extradited back to Baltimore. Mrs. Murray says she will fight extradition all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. God knows she means it.

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