It was 20 years later, but Annie was still doing what comes naturally, and so was the audience: they responded with a standing ovation in Manhattan's New York State Theater on opening night of a vibrant revival of Annie Get Your Gun. Showing her age a bit, yet just as sassy and brassy as ever, Ethel Merman, 57, was back bellowing out such semiclassics as You Can't Get a Man With a Gun, and a new tune called Old Fashioned Wedding that Irving Berlin, 78, cooked up especially for the revival. Later, Irving and Ethel got together and toasted Annie. What a night it had been.

Critic Edmund ("Bunny") Wilson, 71, hates the U.S. income tax, as he proclaimed three years ago in a cranky little tome entitled The Cold War and the Income Tax--a spate of essays prompted by the fact that the Internal Revenue Service found him some $69,000 in arrears and fined him another $7,500 for rather flagrantly failing to file any income tax returns from 1946 to 1955. The matter still rankles--so much so that when the National Book Committee presented him with the 1966 National Medal for Literature and a $5,000 prize, he was still dodging, though not very artfully: "This award is all the more welcome for being taxfree, so that not a penny of it will be demanded for the infamous war in Viet Nam. I am very much gratified, for once, not to have to contribute."

The face is familiar, but . . . Italian Painter Pietro Annigoni, 56, wouldn't say who she was, though he did tell a wry tale about his portrait of the lady in London's Upper Grosvenor Gallery. "This woman came all the way from California to my studio in Florence," he chuckled. "She said: 'I have the most beautiful body in the world, and I wish you to paint me in the nude.' I had never had a proposition like that before. I thought it was a commission. As it turned out, it wasn't. All she wanted was to be painted in the nude by a great artist." So now the great artist's picture of the world's most beautiful body is up for sale at $22,050.

According to his pedigree, the fellow is Archduke of Austria, King of Hungary, Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Galicia and Illyria, King of Jerusalem, Duke of Cracow, Lothringen, Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Silesia, Modena and Parma. But Otto von Habsburg, 53, son of the last Austro-Hungarian monarch (Karl I), has long since given up building castles in the air. Several times he has renounced his pretensions to the nonexistent thrones, though never with enough conviction to satisfy the Austrian government, which refused him entry into his homeland. Now the government has relented. He may come back from Bavarian exile any time he pleases, as plain Herr Habsburg.

Road to Guantanamo ran for only a week, and it didn't have Crosby and Hope either. It was a smash nonetheless. With the troops wolf-whistling, Old Sarong Girl Dorothy Lamour, 51, marched onstage at the Guantanamo Naval Base and told the boys: "I'd like to sing you a bunch of songs which you may think are square. I probably sang them for your fathers in World War II." With that, Dottie launched into Moon of Manakoora and Tangerine. The kids loved it. The only leatherneck with a red face was a Pfc named John R. Howard, who was a little embarrassed about the way his buddies were carrying on about his Mom. But after all, he'd asked her to come down in the first place.

One thing you can say for Jack Valenti's new job: he gets to the movies more, now that he's czar of all the rushes--the $150,000-a-year president of the Motion Picture Association of

America. Taking in his first world premiere in Houston, L.B.J.'s former White House batman watched a poker comedy called A Big Hand for the Little Lady, then emerged to tell the Little Lady, Actress Joanne Woodward, 36, that she was aces. Asked about his plans for the film industry, Valenti replied modestly: "It took the good Lord six days to make the universe. It's going to take me more than two weeks to learn about the movie business."

Apparently in her 26 years of marriage to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the lady has picked up quite a bit of his crisp, statistical style. Accepting a gold medal at Marymount Junior College in Arlington, Va., for her charity work among Washington's poor, Margaret McNamara, 50, discussed one of the controversies in Bob's line of work. "It seems a little premature to worry that the computer is replacing the human brain," said Margy. "The brain is the most magnificent bit of miniaturization in the universe.

Though it weighs only three pounds, it contains some 10 billion nerve cells, each of which has some 25,000 possible interconnections with other nerve cells.

To build an electronic computer large enough to have that range of choice would require an area equal to the entire surface of the earth." O.K., Mac?

Up De Valera,

The rebels as well,

Independence for Ireland

And England to Hell!

--I.R.A. ballad

Fifty years after Dublin's Easter Rebellion, Eamon de Valera, 83, was still up, though the popular buttress was weakening. A thin margin of 10,568 Irish voters out of 1,107,048 served to elect the grand old man to a second seven-year term as President of the Republic, defeating the Fine Gael candidate, Thomas O'Higgins. The loser campaigned from Galway to Sligo, preaching economic development. De Valera merely posed for a newspaper photo of himself standing quietly in the sun. That was still--but barely--enough.

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