The short-pants set won't remember him, but those who pause for breath after climbing a flight of steps recall Jesse Owens, the Negro track-and-field star whose four gold medals left his Aryan hosts at the post during the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Owens is 51 now, a Chicago marketing consultant, but, torch in hand, he puffed a few Manhattan blocks in track shorts to set the pace for 3,500 relay runners in a 3,100-mile cross-country "Run for the Money," to raise $1,000,000 for the 1964 U.S. Olympic team. . . .

Bearded Irish Cinemactor Peter O'Toole, 31, plays the messenger of God who gets saved from a fete worse than death in Sodom in John Huston's The Bible, now afilming in Rome. Off the set, he rains sulphur and brimstone all by himself, according to the paparazzi who tried to snap him downing some friendly firewater with comely British Starlet Barbara Steele. "He charged me, punched me in the face, grabbed my camera, smacking it against my ear," related one razed lensman. "I had to have five stitches taken." Tinkled O'Toole, with the tongue of an angel: "He fell over one of the flower pots that line the avenue."

. . .

She came, was seen by and promptly conquered French cinematographiles last August, and they styled her la B. B. americaine. Now, after a brief period of adjustment, Vassar-bred Jane Fonda, 26, is taking a walk on the wild side with the original Bardolator, Director Roger Vadim, 36. The man who discovered Brigitte's charms bundled Hank's lanky daughter into his favorite costume, a bed sheet, tousled her hair and led her intently through the scenario of his movie version of La Ronde. And, even though the picture is finished, from St. Tropez comes the word, as he did with B. B., Vadim has become very Fonda Jane.

. . .

In Barefoot in the Park, the show that made her a star, her stage mother had this advice: "Make him feel important. If you do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage--like two out of every ten couples." Broadway's barefoot girl, Elizabeth Ashley, 25, sure wants to make him feel important--no, not her husband, whom she plans to divorce, but Cinemactor George Peppard, 36, whose wife is divorcing him. So, borrowing $35,000 to buy six months left in her Broadway contract, Elizabeth ("Bessie" to good friends) lashed on winged sandals and deparked for London, where Peppard is filming Operation Crossbow. "Here I am, poor but happy," she sighed. "What I've done is to buy freedom. I wanted to be near George."

. . .

Forget the status, we need the ante. So quoth Thomas Pickford, 41, founder of the Quorum Club, the dimly lit nob nook in Washington's Carroll Arms Hotel where Bobby Baker pursued his hobbies (and stood them to drinks). Ever since Bobby moved into the spotlight, the Q. Club has had difficulty getting its members to form a Quorum. Now Pickford has dispensed with Robert's Rules of Order. "Your admittance card is your wallet," he assures John Q. Public. "View the celebrated nudes. Wine and dine in one of America's most famous clubs." For $2.50 you can even get a Bobby Baker Steak Sandwich.

. . .

Touring European capitals to explain U.S. policies in Viet Nam is rather too apt a way to spend those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. So U.S. Envoy Henry Cabot Lodge, 62, found it extraordinarily pleasant to take a day off from his mission for a visit to Rome's Ostia Beach with Italian Protocol Chief Guerino Roberti and his family. The latest details in the daily papers on the shifting sands in Saigon could only illustrate what a grind diplomacy is. But as Roberti's noble Roman daughter Cristina pointed out, there are compensations--and Lodge needed only to look at her to agree.

. . .

Burly Chicago Engineer Ted Erikson, 36, looked at the English Channel and said: "I can't afford to swim more than 30 hours. I have an important business appointment in Spain day after tomorrow." Then he waded in, hoping to become the second man to complete the 44-mile round trip to France and back. He took 12 hr. 35 min. to get halfway, was back to within eight miles of Dover when the channel turned against him, forced him to quit. But California Schoolgirl Leonore Modell, 14, doesn't have to worry about the boss. So she swam the chilly channel against the tide in 15 hr. 30 min., became the youngest person in history to make the crossing.

. . .

Ill lay: Stan ("The Man") Musial, 43, at his home in St. Louis following his collapse from exhaustion at a Cardinals-Braves game brought on by his coast-to-coast labors as director of the nation's physical fitness program; Henry A. Barnes, 57, New York City's controversial traffic czar, in Manhattan's Columbus Hospital with his second heart attack in eight days (fourth in a year), smitten while attending the opening of a police academy. Cracked Barnes, after cops gave him emergency oxygen: "I'm lying at death's door, but they're trying to pull me through--but they don't say which way."

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