Back in Manhattan after peddling his new perfume "Y" ($35 an ounce) from one coast to the other, the traveling salesman lounged around his Regency Hotel suite in a bright red sweater and red trousers, waiting for his frilled dress shirt to come back from the laundry. "I have two or three others," murmured French Fashion Prince Yves St. Laurent, 29, "but I just like that one. It's been to 30 or 40 parties on this trip." After all those parties, Yves wanted to visit the Museum of Modern Art. "I want to see Mondrian, the father of my dresses," he sighed to Yvonne de Peyerimhoff, the director of his Paris salon. "A sentimental trip." Some people thought he might also make a trip to the barber before returning to France. "Oh, it's short now," Yves explained, smoothing his beatled locks. "Usually I wear it longer, but one day I was depressed, so I cut my hair."

When he wasn't prowling for precious minerals, Copper Millionaire Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, 90, was gleaning more obscure treasures, such as a 1260 manuscript of the Rubdaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and some priceless 3rd century papyri of the New Testament. "In 51 years of collecting I've accumulated quite a few fine Oriental texts," the U.S.-born British magnate mused proudly. Then he announced that he is bequeathing the 3,000-volume accumulation, valued at $8,000,000, to Ireland, where he has had a home for 18 years, because "the Irish are charming and friendly, and they like old books."

In his blurred grumble, Sculptor Alexander Colder, 67, fussed around supervising the workmen who bolted together his great crablike stabile Le Guichet (The Ticket Window) in the plaza of Manhattan's Lincoln Center. "I don't see the beauty of it," sniffed one worker. Neither had City Parks Commissioner Newbold Morris, who tried to veto the Calder stabile last spring because "art is supposed to transmit thought. Unless it does, I don't get it." But the art certainly transmits Calder, and he ventured the thought that his vertically planed piece was a lot more "pigeon-proof" than the giant Reclining Figure by Henry Moore, installed in a reflecting pool near by. "Poor Henry," said Calder. "I do hate to think of his sculpture out there under all those pigeons."

"Thief! Clown! Animal!" screamed the crowds in Lima's Plaza de Acho, and then, worst of all: "Dancer!" Fumed Bullfight Critic Leonidas Rivera: "There he stood, the most famous matador in Spain, where he just set a record of 111 fights in a single season: a rattled young man trying to get it over with in as short a time and with as little risk to himself as possible. He did not improve things when he kicked the bull in the snout, and he looked simply grotesque when he charged his second bull with head lowered and butted it in its rump." Yawned Manuel Benitez, better known as El Cordobes: "Even a great bullfighter can get tired."

Midst laurels stood: Dr. Albert Sabin, 59, who developed the oral vaccine for polio, given the $10,000 Albert Lasker Award for Chemical Research; U. Alexis Johnson, 57, Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, who calmly directed first-aid operations, though himself wounded, when a Viet Cong bomb shattered the U.S. embassy in Saigon last spring, honored with the $10,000 Rockefeller Public Service Award for Foreign Affairs; Broadway's Sammy Davis Jr., who was converted to Judaism six years ago, named Man of the Year by B'nai B'rith and the Greater New York Committee for the State of Israel Bonds, for his "untiring labors in behalf of human rights and the Jewish people."

"Both of them are so full of zip!" marveled Bing Crosby. They pretty much had to be. Britain's Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon careened through the first turn of their 20-day U.S. visit bunched up with a tight pack of Hollywood types hell-bent on keeping up with, or passing, the Armstrong-Joneses. Meg and Tony seemed to love it all the same, pranced gregariously through endless exhibition tours and a chicken `a la king luncheon at the Universal studios with such West Coast nobility as Greer Garson, Rock Hudson and Charlton Heston. At the World Adoption International Fund Ball at the Palladium, Hostess Jane Russell staged an extravagant lunge of a curtsy, and folk-rocking Sonny and Cher nearly blasted Meg out of her chair. The princess and the earl had a good frantic time, but later Mrs. Milton Berle carped: "All the protocol was inhibiting. I mean, who needs it? To me, Clark Gable is royalty, or Ben-Gurion."

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