Turnabout is fair play, decided bearded New Orleans Jazzman Al Hint, 41. He had cut a disk with the Boston Pops in Symphony Hall, so this time it was Conductor Arthur Fiedler, 69, guesting it high on the revolving stage of Hirt's Bourbon Street hangout. "Where are the other 90 musicians?" Fiedler began, raising his baton, whereupon the six-man combo beat him to the beat by hurtling into Trumpeter's Lullaby. "We only have one rule," Al explained kindly. "The one who finishes first gets to play the ending." Since Fiedler had never really started in the first place, he made the grand finale by cracking his baton across his knee.

At the age of 42, "to please my father, tease the Pope, and spite the devil," Martin Luther, a former Augustinian monk, married Catherine von Bora, a 26-year-old former Cistercian nun. The event horrified Catholic Christendom, set the precedent for all future Protestant divines, and led the humanist Erasmus to remark that the Reformation "had started out like a tragedy, but ended as all comedies doin a wedding." Now from East Germany comes word that Luther's wedding ring, missing since World War I, has apparently been rediscovered in the keeping of a Schonberg family. Engraved on it are the names of the bride and groom and the date: June 13, 1525.

From Anka to Zeckendorf, some 1,500 of Manhattan's nabobs and thing-amabobs brought their fairest ladies to the $150-a-seat benefit premiere of The Movie Version (see CINEMA). The traffic jam packed 14 blocks of Broadway so solidly that Star Audrey Hepburn had to desert her limousine to trek the last block to the theater. Still, the snafu gave the locust swarm of lensmen a heyday, feasting their flashbulbs on the likes of Jean Kennedy Smith and Mrs. Winston ("CeeZee") Guest, as well as a handful of Hollywood's last duchesses. Joan Fontaine simply glowed, Jennifer Jones fluttered a huge black boa, but Pepsi-Cola's sociable Joan Crawford, 56, in her diamond tiara, outqueened them all. "Darling, you must be proud of you!" she said to Audrey at intermission.

On Feb. 15, 1944, the 14th century Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, in central Italy 80 miles south of Rome, was razed by Allied bombers because it was being used as a German stronghold. Today the monastery has been rebuilt in all its Renaissance splendor. Nonetheless, said Pope Paul VI, 67, consecrating its new church, "Just as it seems incredible that war should have been made against this abbey, so it does not seem real to us to see it restored. It is as if it wished to delude us into thinking nothing had happened. We do not wish to pass judgment on those who were the cause. But we cannot but deplore that civilized man dared make the tomb of St. Benedict the target of pitiless violence."

Largely recovered from the ear injury that sidelined him in last spring's U.S. Senate primary race in Ohio, Astronaut John Glenn, 43, was named a director of Georgia's Royal Crown Cola Co.

On board a horse called Slapstick, Jockey Willie Shoemaker won his 5,000th race, and Long Island's Aqueduct race-track officials clustered around to give him a combination clock-thermometer-barometer. The great Eddie Arcaro, who hung up his silks in 1961, booted home only 4,779 winners, and the $32,237,289 won by Shoemaker's mounts surpasses Arcaro's previous record winnings. In the numbers game, the Shoe still has to pass veteran John Longden, who at 57 has 5,900 wins to his string. But with Willie only a sprout of 33, that record should be a shoo-in.

The Long Island Gold Coast that F. Scott Fitzgerald talked about is a trifle tarnished, with all those marinas and split-level commuter crates along the North Shore. Still, there are a few old-order enclaves, such as 47-acre West Island in Glen Cove, owned by Louise Converse Morgan, widow of Junius S., daughter-in-law of J. P., artist, philanthropist, and a lady who so loves to cultivate her gardens that most of the remaining Social Registerites in the region have never met her. On her estate, Jacqueline Kennedy, 35, has leased a "small" (ten-room) weekend cottage, with stables for Sardar and Macaroni.

Ill lay: Dwight Eisenhower, 74, at Washington's Walter Reed Hospital with a "moderately severe" inflammation of the respiratory tract; former Supreme Court Justice Harold Burton, 76, in Washington's George Washington University Hospital with an advanced case of Parkinson's disease; Playwright Lorraine Hansberry, 34, in a coma with cancer at Manhattan's University Hospital; Comedienne Carol Burnett, 29, in traction ("I'll probably be 7 feet 8 inches when I get out") at Manhattan's Hospital for Joint Diseases, for correction of a spinal injury incurred during a pratfall in her 1959 hit, Once Upon a Mattress.

Down Under wasn't exactly where Arnold Palmer, 35, was golfing last week. It was Up Yonder. True, Arnie was playing in a tournament near Melbourne, but on the ninth hole, his second shot came to rest 20 ft. up a gum tree. Officials said he could drop it, for a two-stroke penalty, or replay the shot, for one, but Arnie's Aussie army was hollering: " 'Ave a go!" So up he clambered, then took a swipe-whish-splonk-wobble-thonk, and the ball, at least, bounced to the ground. Arnie bogeyed the hole-but only because he goofed the putt.

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