The big event on television this week, if all goes as planned, is the Gemini-Titan 4 space shot scheduled to blast off from Cape Kennedy Thursday at 9 a.m DEGAll three networks plan extensive coverage of the launch (which NBC will broadcast in live color), frequent reports from the space craft during the 63-orbit, four-day flight, a generous assortment of specials and summaries and even an attempt to have a pool reporter with audio gear aboard one of the recovery helicopters. Elsewhere on TV:

Wednesday .June 2

SHINDIG (ABC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Actress Patty Duke, who at 18 has already chalked up an Oscar and a successful TV series, now takes on rock 'n' roll, introducing songs from her first record, just released.

Thursday. June 3

KRAFT SUSPENSE THEATER (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Ethel Merman and Larry Blyden play a landlady and her tenant who conspire to steal a $2,000,000 jeweled scepter once wielded by Louis XIV. Color.

Friday. June 4

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Bob Newhart appears as a scientist whose electronic computer has a nervous breakdown. Color.

FDR (ABC, 9:30-10 p.m.). Coal strikes, race riots, congressional feuds and Thomas E. Dewey--in short, the events of 1943.44.

MISS U.S.A. BEAUTY PAGEANT (CBS, 10-11:30 p.m.). Live from Miami Beach, the selection of the U.S. entry for the Miss Universe competitions in July.

Saturday. June 5

THE BELMONT STAKES (CBS. 5-5:30 p.m.). The last race of the Triple Crown, at Aqueduct.

Monday. June 7

GEMINI-TITAN 4 (ABC, CBS, NBC. beginning about 9 a.m.). Re-entry and recovery of GT-4.

Tuesday. June 8

THE LOUVRE (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). A rerun of last fall's excellent special on the Paris museum with narration by Charles Boyer. Color.

WHO CAN VOTE? (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). An NBC News special on the voting rights of minority groups in the U.S.

THEATER On Broadway

THE GLASS MENAGERIE. The texture of Tennessee Williams' 1945 family drama remains unfrayed. a tight weave of poignancy and poesy. The cast is rather lack luster, but the play is by far the best on Broadway.

HALF A SIXPENCE. A musical-corned version of H. G. Wells's Kipps, Sixpence trips the fantastic ever so lightly. Tommy Steele smiles all the while as a cockney lad who blithely gains and loses fortunes.

THE ODD COUPLE. Art Carney and Wal ter Matthau are riotous roommates in Neil Simon's hilarious study of two men who thought they couldn't live with their wives--until they tried living with each other.

LUV. Three super-self-aware characters, dizzy from watching the way their little worlds turn, are given a satiric whirl by Playwright Murray Schisgal. Alan Arkin, Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach are the comic dervishes.

THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. A righteous busybody (Alan Alda) causes a neighboring prostitute (Diana Sands) to be evicted from her place. She puts him in his--to the audience's delight.

Off Broadway

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ENTIRE WORLD AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF COLE PORTER REVISITED. The distilled wit and pleasant melodies of seldom-heard Porter songs are consistently entertaining in this campy revue. Kaye Ballard heads a sprightly cast.

JUDITH. If the apocryphal Jewess was as fascinating as Rosemary Harris' portrayal of her, it is not difficult to believe that she could save Israel with her beauty and courage. What Jean Giraudoux probes is the psychology of why she did what she did.

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE. Arthur Miller treats epic themes in his story of a Brooklyn longshoreman who destroys himself and his family because of incestuous longings for his niece.

RECORDS

Virtuosos

HOROWITZ PLAYS SCARLATTI (Columbia). Scarlatti intended his miniature sonatas for the harpsichord (a pianoforte can distort them beyond recognition). Pianist Horowitz, who selected twelve of the 550 little pieces to show the 18th century master's range and "daring," allows an occasional chord to crash, but sensitively inflects the whispered dialogues and makes the dreamy passages more cantabile than any harpsichordist could.

SVIATOSLAV RICHTER: CHOPIN, RACHMANINOFF, PROKOFIEV, RAVEL (RCA Victor). The album was recorded by the introspective Russian at two of his 1960 recitals in the U.S. He casts a hypnotic spell with Ravel's La Vallee des Cloches and Chopin's Scherzo in E Major, then snaps wide awake with Prokofiev's Gavotte from Cinderella and the sharply etched Visions Fugitives.

CHRISTIAN FERRAS: SIBELIUS' VIOLIN CONCERTO (Deutsche Grammophon). A grandiose production of the romantic work by the young French violinist and the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan. The orchestra, dark with woodwinds, is an immense and sometimes cavernous-sounding backdrop for the deep, round voice of Ferras' violin, swift with chromatic leaps and flaming trills.

FOU TS'ONG: CHOPIN'S MAZURKAS (Westminster). One could scarcely dance i i these 18 mazurkas played by Fou Ts'ong he sometimes rushes the rhythms, sometimes lingers behind to savor every delicacy. But the Poles liked the spirit and grace of his mazurkas so well that they awarded the young Chinese a prize in their International Chopin Competition of 1955.

GLENN GOULD PLAYS BEETHOVEN PIANO SONATAS NOS. 5, 6, 7 (Columbia). Actually Gould both plays and hums the piano sonatas, accompanied by the squeaks of his piano stool. When Gould rushes headlong into a presto and comes out alive to brood over a largo, however, one stays to listen.

RUGGIERO RICCI: PAGANISM'S VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 2 (Decca). Although Paganini gives an artist little chance to plumb emotional depths, one hardly notices when the surface shimmers with such excitement. Ricci has dazzling technique, a clear, buoyant style and a sensuous tone that sweetens the devilish Italian's operatic melodies. The album also marks the return to recording, after ten years, of the excellent Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, under Max Rudolf.

JANOS STARKER: TCHAIKOVSKY'S VARIATION ON A ROCOCO THEME (Mercury). Tchaikovsky never wrote a cello concerto but this 16-minute piece makes the orchestra a shining display case for the instrument and for Starker. The theme dimly reflects Tchaikovsky's love for the 18th century and especially for Mozart, "the musical Christ," but the variations are strictly 19th century, as romantic as Swan Lake. Starker and the London Symphony Orchestra under Antal Dorati also play the Saint-Saens Cello Concerto in A Minor.

CINEMA

MIRAGE. An amnesic scientist (Gregory Peck) with a top secret tucked away in his head worries his way through an absorbing jigsaw plot, aided by a reluctant private eye (Walter Matthau) who doesn't take the work too seriously.

CAT BALLOU. This waggish western spurns heroics and drums up unbridled hilarity when Jane Fonda, as a schoolmarm turned outlaw queen, gets mixed up with a couple of no-good gunfighters--both spoofed to perfection by Lee Marvin in a duel role.

THE YELLOW ROLLS-ROYCE. Rex Harrison and Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon and Shirley MacLaine, Omar Sharif and Ingrid Bergman, climb in and out of a 1930-model Phantom II, lending elegance and star power to an episodic movie about roadside amour.

NOBODY WAVED GOODBYE. In sensitive, semidocumentary style, Canadian Writer-Director Don Owen explores the problems of two rebellious Toronto teen-agers (Peter Kastner and Julie Biggs) as if his camera were merely eavesdropping.

THE ROUNDERS. More horse-operatics, with Fonda pere (Henry) and Glenn Ford filling the wry open spaces with amiable nonsense about two lazy broncobusters and an unbustable mount.

IL SUCCESSO. Italy's affluent society yields one wriggling, upwardly striving nobody (Vittorio Gassman) who is Exhibit A in this fiercely funny satire about the price a man pays for life at the top.

IN HARM'S WAY. Director Otto Preminger remembers Pearl Harbor just long enough to launch John Wayne, Patricia Neal and other heroic types into several exciting tales of World War II.

A BOY TEN FEET TALL. A rough-cut diamond thief (Edward G. Robinson) and a wandering British boy (Fergus McClelland) get together for some refreshing runaway adventures in modern Africa.

THE PAWNBROKER. Rod Steiger gives a virtuoso performance as an embittered old Jew whose half life in Spanish Harlem is shaped by the memory of Nazi terrors.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about the Trapp Family Singers sometimes swells around an audience like marshmallow cream, but

Julie Andrews makes the sticky stuff easy to swallow.

RED DESERT. Soul-searching against the blighted landscape of industrial Ravenna, with Monica Vitti as a neurotic young wife whose alienation is stunningly visualized in Director Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film.

BOOKS

Best Reading

DOG YEARS, by Gunter Grass. A powerful, complex, exhausting novel of two men --one Jew. one Gentile, neither wholly admirable--who belonged to "the Nazi generation" in Germany. Grass's theme is, of course, guilt, and few postwar writers have evoked it so powerfully.

THE VIOLENT LAND, by Jorge Amado. Set in Bahia. Brazil's equivalent of the American West, this novel is something of a Brazilian Ox-Bow Incident. The characters, situations and locale are those of a western, but Amado's writing skill lifts them above the routine.

THE VALLEY OF THE LATIN BEAR, by Alexander Lenard. Two years ago, the author charmed his way into literary life with the succes foil of the season--a translation into Latin of Winnie the Pooh. In this book, as charming in its way as Pooh was. Lenard expounds his genially picaresque philosophy of life and tells of his years as a doctor and pharmacologist in a remote village in southern Brazil.

ASSORTED PROSE, by John Updike. An early arrival on the summer-reading shelf, this collection of nostalgic and humorous essays and reportage (including the classic account of Ted Williams' last game at Boston's Fenway Park), gracefully serves to remind the reader that few writers ex ceed Updike in mastery of words.

THE OLD ORDER AND THE NEW, by Wilfred Fowler. A novel about the end of British rule in an African state, written in a very different idiom from most modern fiction--terse, laconic, sinewed prose.

TAKEN CARE OF, by Edith Sitwell. Dame Edith's memoirs, completed shortly before her death last year, shed harsh new light on a gifted metaphysical poet and self-dramatist who acted out endless roles for herself with astounding audacity.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Ambassador, West (2 last week)

2. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (3)

3. Herzog, Bellow (1)

4. Don't Stop the Carnival, Wouk (4)

5. Hotel, Hailey (5)

6. The Flight of the Falcon, Du Maurier (6)

7. Hurry Sundown, Gilden

8. The Source, Michener (8)

9. The Man, Wallace (9)

10. Funeral in Berlin, Deighton (7)

NONFICTION 1. Markings, Hammarskjold (1)

2. Queen Victoria, Longford (3)

3. Journal of a Soul, Pope John XXIII (2)

4. The Italians, Barzini (8)

5. The Oxford History of the American People, Morison (4)

6. The Founding Father, Whalen (6)

7. How to Be a Jewish Mother, Greenburg (7)

8. My Shadow Ran Fast, Sands (5)

9. Aly, Slater

10. Sixpence in Her Shoe, McGinley (9)

* All times E.D.T.

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