At a dinner in Manhattan, the National Institute of Social Sciences honored Secretary of State Dean Rusk, 55, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, 66, A. T. & T. Chairman Frederick Kappel, 62, and that noted social scientist, Bob Hope, 61. Cracked Hope, as he accepted his award (for his "contribution to the nation's values"), "I thought this should go to Cassius Clay--for his great medical discovery, the first man to get a hernia through talking." Hope had his doubts about Kappel: "I don't see how you can give a humanitarian award to a man who had anything to do with digit dialing." But he felt Senator Smith had made a wonderful try for the presidency: "She didn't know Johnson was going to be the nominee for both parties." Bob also swore that "Rusk said to me, 'You might as well go to Viet Nam --we've tried everything else.' '

He set a new style in Government investigating techniques as the late Senator Joe McCarthy's boy. He set a new high in settlements this summer, winning $1,500 weekly for the estranged wife of Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner. Last week, aboard a night jet from New York to Paris, Manhattan Lawyer Roy Cohn, 37, set a new high style by emerging from the washroom to walk the length of the plane in canary-yellow silk pajamas and chat with a friend in the back. Said a Pan Am stewardess: "I've never seen that before."

So completely has she dropped out of the spotlight that even the New York Daily News photographer didn't put name and face together. "Are you any relation to the Governor?" he asked, and was somewhat shaken when she replied, "I'm his former wife." But Philadelphia's Mary Todhunter Clark Rockefeller, 57, was class long before she married Nelson (indeed, as one Main Line matron put it at the time: "A young New York man is marrying into the Clark family"). And so it was only natural that she should attend a reception given by Manhattan Society Portraitist Jean Denis Maillart and chat with the guest of honor Nicole Alphand, 37, wife of the French ambassador.

Breezing through India, carrot-topped West Wind Shirley Madame, 30, instantly charmed Lhendup Dorji, Premier of Bhutan, into letting her become the 14th American permitted to visit his remote Himalayan kingdom. But before taking off, she spent an evening in Bombay discussing Gandhian philosophy with Indian Actor Dev

Anand, and began spouting a little Hindu philosophy on her own. "I think I must have been an Indian once," she mused, "perhaps in another life," and turned up at Bombay's Jhaveri Bazaar, with jasmine blossoms in her hair, caste mark on forehead, and a blue-and-gold silk sari. "I'm convinced the sari is made for a woman," said Shirley, and how right she was.

When Ben Franklin in Paris opened at the Lunt-Fontanne, Music Man Robert Preston, 46, moved into the dressing room used last summer by Richard Burton. That seemed to set the tone of things. Three weeks later, Preston moved out on his offstage wife of 24 years, Catherine, and began to concentrate on after-theater sorties with his leading lady, Swedish Singer Ulla Sallert, 41. Ulla says it is "just a coincidence" that she is divorcing her husband of 19 years, Baron Franz von Lampe. "I am not a home-cracker," she coos, "but if I'm invited by my leading partner to dinner, I don't see why I shouldn't accept."

Cancer, said the doctors in 1821. But Frenchmen have always suspected that it was his British captors on St. Helena who slew Napoleon Bonaparte at the age of 51. Now a British scientist, Hamilton Smith, thinks he has proved it: he subjected samples of Napoleon's hair to nuclear bombardment in Britain's Harwell reactors and found arsenic! Only, being an Englishman, he says that his associates believe it was Napoleon's French chamberlain, General Charles-Tristan de Montholon, who poisoned the Emperor. French historians hooted down the theory as so much old lace. The hairs were fakes. And anyway, sneered a scholar in Napoleon's native Corsica: "It would be unthinkable to trouble the remains of the Emperor, even to clear the English of the blame."

Be it ever so decked out in satinstriped wallpaper, No. 10 Downing Street is still home to Gladys Mary Wilson, 48. The new P.M.'s wife has moved in her washing machine and drying rack ("I couldn't quite see myself hanging out the washing") and dismissed the cook, being a whiz herself at smoked haddock, custard, and those parched tea dainties known hopefully by the British as "little fairy cakes." Harold smothers everything else in steak sauce, and the Government Hospitality Service takes care of banquets. It was frightfully pleb to the ex-cook, Alice Green. "I would have made the best of it," she sniffed, "but Mrs. Wilson wanted to be a housewife."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.