On the eve of the couple's 30th wedding anniversary, a much delayed invitation arrived from Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth II would be pleased if the Duke and Duchess of Windsor could come to England from the U.S. to attend the dedication next month in Marlborough House of a memorial plaque to the Duke's mother, the late Queen Mary. It was, said the palace, strictly a family affair. Nevertheless, it marked the first time since his abdication and marriage that the British crown has taken formal recognition of the former King's twice-divorced American wife--though the Duchess and the Queen did chat two years ago when they met at London Clinic, where the Duke was undergoing eye surgery.

The neat signature at the bottom of the weekly intramural sports schedule in Amherst College's Pratt dorm spells Eisenhower. Ike's only grandson, David, 18, signs it as sports chairman of the dorm, and his classmates have been having their own kind of sport with it. They send the signature home as a souvenir, and in a matchmaking spirit have even mailed a couple of mint specimens to Smith College Freshman Julie Nixon, 17. Except for the holograph hounds, though, the little Lord Jeffreys make no fuss over David. "We have a Cabot at Amherst," explains an insouciant classmate, "and that's as high as you can go."

He had been denied top honors twice before by the inscrutable Cannes Film Festival jury, and she had been passed over only last month for an Oscar. So now, with each other for moral support, Italian Director Michelangelo Antonioni, 54, and British Actress Vanessa Redgrave, 30, she in sequined tunic and tights, braved a screening at Cannes of Blow-Up, in which Vanessa had taken a relatively small part simply because "I wanted to be directed by Antonioni." After the showing, Vanessa went home to London, but Antonioni stayed on for the happy ending: a Golden Palm applauding Blow-Up as the best film of the 25 shown at the festival.

No one involved even deigned to take notice when Agatha Christie's comedy-thriller, The Mousetrap, passed its 6,000th London performance last week (v. a measly 2,238 for former British record holder Chu Chin Chow). Since opening night in 1952, more than 2,000,000 people have bought tickets to the tiny (435 seats) Ambassadors' Theatre, and 97 actors have peopled the play's eight roles. "Just about everybody in England has seen it except the Queen," says Producer Peter Saunders, "and she thinks she's seen it." Author Christie, 76, has given no interview on the subject since 1961, claiming that she has run out of things to say. Small wonder. Believing The Mousetrap good for about a six-month run, she had made a thoughtful little gift of the royalties to her grandson, Michael Pritchard, who keeps up a 900-acre estate, an 18th century manor house and an Alfa-Romeo on the proceeds.

Manhattan Restaurateur Toots Shor, 62, uses "meathead" as a term of endearment and "ya bum ya" as a near proposal of marriage. But for all the boisterous language, the beefy Shor is a self-professed "lover, not a fighter," who forever reminds himself, he says, that "the first rule of any saloonkeeper is never put your hands on a customer." It was therefore with some mortification that Shor found himself yanked by the cops from his Park Avenue apartment in the wee hours and arrested on charges of decking one customer and choking another in a fracas at his boozery earlier that night. "This is the first time I've been collared in 40 years in the saloon business," Shor wailed. "Did I hit him? If I did, would he be around? The whole thing is a silly farce."

"To my disgust I found that this first contact with human beings was making me tremble," radioed the old sea dog after sighting another ship for the first time since he rounded Cape Horn 60 lonely days ago. But the great adventure was almost ended. Now less than two weeks and 2,000 miles from the end of his solitary 28,500-mile sailing voyage around the world, Sir Francis Chichester reported that his 53-ft. ketch Gipsy Moth IV had broken clear of the doldrums and was running smoothly before the North Atlantic winds. The real trem bling will begin after he gets home. Britain is whipping up a reception worthy of Lord Nelson, with Queen Elizabeth planning to meet him at dockside at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and confer a knighthood with the sword once carried by Sir Francis Drake. The two Sir Francises have already been placed side by side at Madame Tussaud's famed waxworks in London.

It seemed to J.W. Munson, president of Austin's small but fast-growing Citizens National Bank ($12.5 million assets since its founding in 1961), that the University of Texas graduate student looked like quite a comer. After all, the young man was already in training in Austin's only TV broadcasting company, had moved with his wife into a $50,000 French Provincial house in the best part of town. So impressed was Munson by what he saw and heard of the young man that he appointed Pat Nugent, 23, to the board of directors of Citizens National. "We feel," Munson said confidently, "that he will be a good director." Besides, his father-in-law controls 2,000 shares of stock in the bank.

Though Italian Actress Claudia Cardinale, 29, was only one of about 3,000 movie and TV people attending a special papal audience in honor of World Social Communications Day, something about her stood out: her knees. Demure ly clad in black from crown to mid-thigh, C.C. abruptly ran out of dress at a point three inches above the patella. The Pope seemed unruffled during his brief chat with her, but the scene was too much for the Vatican's weekly L'Osservatore Delia Domenica, which sharply denounced "those brainless creatures who profess a pseudo anti-conformism and look more like monkeys with their capricious, extravagant styles."

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