'Tis an unweeded garden. And full of sound and fury at that, signifying millions of dollars. And so, as he rested for a month on the profits, hirsute Drum-beatle Ringo Starr, 25, let even more of the follicles sprout, wound up looking like a puckish Rasputin. "I hate shaving anyway," he itched. With that, Ringo took off with beardless John Lennon and their beatlemates, Maureen, the ex-hairdresser, and Cynthia, to spend ten days on Tobago, the storied Caribbean island home of shaggy Robinson Crusoe.

In a lawsuit about publication of Ernest Hemingway memorabilia, his widow Mary noted that royalties from his works have averaged $200,000 a year since his death in 1961.

Back home in Indiana, Astronaut Frank Borman, 37, had a pilot's caution about the U.S. space program. "It is inevitable," he warned in Gary, "that we must lose a crew in space some day. All of us have lost friends in flying. I hope the public is mature enough to know that we must pay with money, and certainly with lives."

Sacre Cordon Bleu! French Master Chef Rene Verdon, 41, who steamed out of the White House kitchen complaining about the Texas menus, has gone to work as "culinary consultant" to the Hamilton Beach Division of the Scovill Manufacturing Co. in Racine, Wis. Le metier: touring the U.S. to demonstrate electric blenders and knives and whoop it up for the company cookbook, which recommends such delicacies as hamburger soup, crab-meat corn chowder, and baked honey-orange ham slice.

Always short of das Rheingold on his $115-a-month allowance, high-living Wolfgang ("Wummi") Wagner, 23, made up an unheroic plot. Tucked away in the family's old Villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth was an 1839 pencil sketch that Jean Auguste Ingres had made of Composer Franz Liszt, and after the great

Richard's great-grandson stumbled onto that, he spirited it off to Munich's Karl and Faber auction house to sell for pocket money. "Goetterdaemmerung!" the family muttered when they heard what Wummi was up to. When the auction house refused to withdraw the sketch, the Wagners bid it back from themselves for $26,200, and dolefully paid $5,700 in commissions to the auctioneers. Wummi got not a pfennig.

The lady crackled, "To hell with the money. I want my husband's jewels back." Since she scarcely counts all her fives and dimes, Woolworth Heiress Barbara Mutton, 53, could afford to be cavalier about the cash. Anyway, the thieves who broke into her $1,500,000 mansion near Cuernavaca, Mexico, took only $20,240--and most of that was in traveler's checks. What burned Babs was that they footpadded off with the "irreplaceable" jewel collection of her seventh husband, Laotian Prince Raymond Doan Vinh Na Champassak. The princess felt so sentimental about the necklace with the gold and diamond elephants, the opal stickpin, the emerald cuff links and the rest that she posted a $10,000 reward.

Besides boasting Europe's most outstanding fleshpot, the Reeperbahn, with its banks of bordellos, the good city of Hamburg has a stern ordinance against picturing nudes on public posters. So it was only natural that when the manager of the Hamburger Aussenwerbung ad agency saw that scabrous lithograph, Painter and His Model, by Marc Chagall, he flatly refused to handle it as a poster for the Chagall exhibition at the Kunsthaus Center. Unless Kunsthaus Director Eylert Spars would let him paste a paper ribbon across the model's breasts. Spars sighed, and instead of posting his 800 posters, sold them off at the exhibition for $1.25 each.

"Our energetic and talented First Lady has opened a new door in the dream of total conservation," cheered the National Wildlife Federation and the Sears-Roebuck Foundation. And so they presented Lady Bird Johnson with the first annual Whooping Crane Award for "distinguished service to conservation." Other whoopers went to New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Idaho's Senator Frank Church, the Outdoor Writers Association and General Electric Co., but it was Lady Bird who soared in her acceptance speech. "The psalms and the poetry throughout our history recount the strength from the hills," she said. "Thank you for this whooping crane."

For months Cartoonist Charles Schulz, 43, had been playing with the notion of having Snoop's doghouse burn down. Now the idea doesn't seem so comic--nor does Schulz's nickname, "Sparky." Last week his one-story studio in Sebastqpol, Calif., caught fire and burned to the ground. There were almost some roasted Peanuts, but Schulz's daughter Meredith raced in and saved a batch of strips he'd drawn for February. Snoopy is--whew!--safe.

The French understand these things, sighed Director (The Collector) William Wyler, 63, after filming How to Steal a Million Dollars in Paris. In Hollywood, explained Willie, those unromantic craft unions demand a 9-to-6 schedule, so the miserable starlets have to rise at a barbaric 6 a.m. for costumes and makeup, are too yawny to be spawny when they go before the cameras. "It's uncivilized to shoot a love scene at 9 in the morning. Everybody looks foolish," groused Willie, adding that while he'll still direct that Hollywood foolishness in the future, he will make more pictures in Europe, where they start shooting at 12 and all the love is in the afternoon.

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