Wednesday, May 24

THE BEST ON RECORD (NBC, 9-10 p.m.)* Such Grammy Award-winning performers as The New Vaudeville Band, Eydie Gorme, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charles sing the songs that earned the recording industry's highest honors.

Thursday, May 25

TWIGGY IN HOLLYWOOD (ABC, 9:30-10 p.m.). The second of the specials on the fashion model with the A-frame and catchy name: poolside at the Bel Air Hotel, in Lana Turner's old studio dressing room, on the Camelot movie set.

SUMMER FOCUS (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). "Dissent--or Treason?" examines the moral aspects of protest in the U.S., focusing on the current anti-Viet Nam war demonstrations. Excerpts from speeches by President Johnson and Secretary Rusk, comments from prominent hawks and doves, plus a review of protest in the U.S. by Historian Henry Steele Commager.

Friday, May 26

CORTEZ AND THE LEGEND (ABC, 8-9 p.m.). Kirk Douglas narrates the epic of Hernando Cortez's conquest of Mexico. Cameras retrace the route taken by Cortez and his band from Tabasco, where they landed in 1519, to Mexico City, site of Montezuma's Aztec capital, which they destroyed in 1521.

THE AMERICAN IMAGE (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). How painters have seen the U.S. from colonial days to the present is recorded in 150 works from the recent Whitney Museum retrospective "Art of the United States--1670-1966." The show also includes previously filmed interviews with such contemporary artists as Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, Jack Levine, Robert Rauschenberg and the late Stuart Davis.

Saturday, May 27

THE JACKIE GLEASON SHOW (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). The Great One winds up his twelfth TV season with appropriate fanfare: an outdoor show before 12,000 people at Florida's Gulfstream Race Track, featuring Cornetist Bobby Hackett, Singer Dick Roman, Saxophonist Charlie Ventura, a high diver, a trapeze act, and an aerialist performing beneath a hovering helicopter.

Sunday, May 28

26TH ANNUAL B.P.A.A. ALL-STAR TOURNAMENT (CBS, 1:30-2:30 p.m.). The World Series of bowling, with the two best men and two best women competing for the Bowling Proprietors' Association of America championship title in their respective divisions and a total of $20,000 in prize money.

Monday, May 29

CORONET BLUE (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A young man (Frank Converse), who becomes an amnesiac after being shot by assailants and tossed off an ocean liner, begins his search for his true identity in this new dramatic series. Premiere.

Tuesday, May 30 THE RED SKELTON HOUR (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Red is reunited with Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, who were bandleader and singer on his first radio show in 1941.

IVANOV (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). Sir John Gielgud, who with Author John Bowen has adapted Anton Chekhov's play for TV, also stars in the life-sick title role. Cast includes Claire Bloom, Roland Culver, Angela Baddeley and Yvonne Mitchell.

NET PLAYHOUSE (shown on Fridays). "Ballet Gala" features principal dancers from Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet, London's Royal Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet performing excerpts from Swan Lake, Don Quixote and Romeo and Juliet.

NET JOURNAL (shown on Mondays). "To Be a Man" chronicles student life at Yale, from the tables down at Mory's to a classroom lecture in evolution. Repeat.

THEATER

On Broadway

YOU KNOW I CAN'T HEAR YOU WHEN THE WATER'S RUNNING. Some people envision sex as a noble Venus. Others picture it as a mischievous Cupid. Some think it inspiring, others downright funny. In his four playlets, Robert Anderson uses it to tease, to tickle, and to touch his audience, at times moving them to laughter, and at times to tears.

THE HOMECOMING is the winner of this year's New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony. Any resemblance between the characters in Harold Pinter's absorbing drama and the family next door is purely metaphysical.

BLACK COMEDY mixes a technique of Chinese theater with stage business from vaudeville. It is strictly a one-joke play--about the goings-on when the lights go off --but the joke works. Peter Shaffer is the playwright, Michael Crawford and Geraldine Page the leading actors.

Off Broadway

TO CLOTHE THE NAKED. As a young governess who dies because she cannot keep alive a fantasy, Kathleen Widdoes handles her role with delicate authority. Although lesser Pirandello, Naked still demonstrates the Italian's mastery in dealing with intellectual questions while infusing them with emotional content.

HAMP. Based on a novel by J. L. Hodson, John Wilson's play is a critical examination of a court-martial and its decision in favor of discipline rather than compassion. Robert Salvio is Private Hamp, a World War I infantryman condemned to death after his fears and instincts caused him to flee the bloodshed of the front.

RECORDS

Teen Hits

The current pop scene includes deafening electronic barrages, puerile love ditties and screaming imitations of oldtime rhythm and blues so explicitly sexual that they embarrass and worry many adult listeners. But the kids seem to be getting kicks out of such albums as these:

SOCK IT TO ME! (New Voice). The title song sounds the keynote to the frenzied demands of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, the ear-splitting hot-rods of white rhythm 'n' blues, also known as blue-eyed soul. "Sock it to me, baby, gimme, gimme, gimme," screams Mitch, sounding pretty clear about what he wants. "I'd rather go to jail than to see you get away," he persists. The boys used to call themselves the Young Degenerates.

HAPPY TOGETHER (White Whale). It's spring, and the voice of the Turtles is heard in our land. Their refrain: "I can't see me lovin' nobody but you for all my life." The chart-climbing group runs to ABC melodies, soft harmonies and unabashed sentiments. "It may be corny, but I hear wedding bells," admits the head Turtle.

SUPER PSYCHEDELICS (Liberty). The Ventures are still noisily going their own way, having successfully sold two dozen albums of songs without words. Using a mix of guitars and drums, they now turn psychedelic with swooning cadences, spooky buzzes and reverberating thuds, suitably orchestrating such turned-on titles as Psyched Out and Endless Dream.

ELECTRIC COMIC BOOK (Mercury). The fad for psychedelic music has mushroomed to enormous proportions and now even includes jokes on itself by goofy groups like the Blues Magoos, who got in their first big licks with Psychedelic Lollipop. The five Magoos like to think that their kaleidoscopic screens of sound resemble a traffic jam in Times Square; they should be so lyrical.

ERIC IS HERE (MGM). Time was when the Animals had growl and bite, a sound as earthy as the Rolling Stones'. But they have been tamed and harnessed to a carefully arranged orchestra, while Leader Eric Burdon sings a broad spectrum of the blues (In the Night, I Think It's Gonna Rain Today). Eric's voice is good and his sobs most mellifluous, but the total effect is more glossy than real.

5 BY 5 (Epic). In the first wave of the British invasion came the nattily dressed Dave Clark Five, now elder statesmen of rock 'n' roll. They seem to have a steady following for their hoarsely shouted banal laments--but then they deal with eternal problems, e.g., I been away too long; you don't want my lovin'; how can I tell you it's over?

THE BEST OF THE LOVIN' SPOONFUL (Kama Sutra). Albums of golden oldies are giving way to collections of shiny newies. This is the instant anthology of the folk-rock group known as the Lovin' Spoonful: five songs from their Day Dream album, one from their Hums and six from Do You Believe in Magic, their first LP, which is not yet two years old. In any event, the new collection is already one of the top sellers, proving that one hit album deserves another, even if it consists of more or less the same songs.

CINEMA

MADE IN ITALY. Italian Director Nanni Loy (Four Days of Naples) has pieced together a mosaic of ironic episodes to portray modern Italy. Best of an interesting lot: the scene in which Anna Magnani tries to herd her family across a busy Italian boulevard.

TWO FOR THE ROAD. Audrey Hepburn is surprisingly good as a Virginia Woolf-cub, but Albert Finney is curiously unsympathetic as her husband in a union that keeps going on strike.

CASINO ROYALE. Several fine performances (David Niven, Woody Allen, Deborah Kerr), five directors (including John Huston), $12 million and the rights to one of Ian Fleming's best James Bond novels have not prevented the movie from over-spilling into incoherent vaudeville.

NAKED AMONG THE WOLVES. The East Germans have made a stark and 'powerful film about a small Jewish boy who is protected from the Nazis by his fellow inmates of Buchenwald.

ACCIDENT. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay, and Joseph Losey directed this glacial dissection of human passion against the background of an Oxonian summer.

BOOKS

Best Reading

BATTLES IN THE MONSOON, by S.L.A. Marshall. A campaign chronicle (summer 1966) punctuated by booby traps, firefights and personal courage that gives deep meaning to the Viet Nam war.

BYLINE: ERNEST HEMINGWAY, edited by William White. A trek through the major wars of the 20th century and other action journalism in the company of the man whose pen set the style for reporting and living them.

CLOWN ON FIRE, by Aaron Judah. Novelist Judah transplants a Polish Jewish family to India, where Mama worries about the Hadassah and whether her daughters will marry Buddhists. Her son turns out to be an Eastern cousin to Salinger's Holden Caulfield, and his dark days at the Horace College of Rifles in Peshawar rival Holden's at Pencey Prep any old day.

A MAN CALLED LUCY, by Pierre Accoce and Pierre Quet. A spy history that concerns itself with the most unbelievable--and unbelieved--of World War II agents: Swiss-based Rudolph ("Lucy") Roessler, who told all to the Allies and found credence only in the Kremlin.

JUST AROUND THE CORNER: A HIGHLY SELECTIVE HISTORY OF THE THIRTIES, by Robert Bendiner. A notably undepressing recollection of the idiocies and ideologies that lent a special flavor to the Depression.

MAY WE BORROW YOUR HUSBAND? AND OTHER COMEDIES OF THE SEXUAL LIFE, by Graham Greene. In twelve unmannered. perfectly controlled short stories, Greene again sifts a favorite theme: sex. But this time it is autumnal sex, viewed from the vantage point of memory.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Arrangement, Kazan (1 last week) 2. The Eighth Day, Wilder (2) 3. The Secret of Santa Vittoria, Crichton (3) 4. Tales of Manhattan, Auchincloss (4) 5. Fathers, Gold (6) 6. Capable of Honor, Drury (5) 7. Washington, D.C., Vidal 8. Go to the Widow-Maker, Jones (9) 9. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (8) 10. The Captain, De Hartog (7)

NONFICTION

1. The Death of a President, Manchester (1) 2. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (2) 3. Madame Sarah, Skinner (4) 4. Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet, Steam (3) 5. Everything But Money, Levenson (5) 6. Games People Play, Berne (7) 7. Disraeli, Blake (9) 8. Paper Lion, Plimpton (6) 9. Inside South America, Gunther (10) 10. The Jury Returns, Nizer (8)

* All times E.D.T.

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