His red, blue and orange Rolls-Royce earned the London Daily Express' admiration as "a cross between a psychedelic nightmare and an autumn garden on wheels." But it was a pretty square set of wheels compared to John Lennon's latest vehicle--an 1874 carriage, fundamentally yellow with wild flowers rampant, which was triumphantly drawn up to Lennon's mansion in Weybridge, Surrey, by two white horses in front with two more trotting at the rear. The new Beatlemobile, which cost Lennon about $10,000 to buy and have refurbished, "is really a toy for four-year-old Julian," said John, who is vacationing en famille in Greece with the Ringo Starrs and Paul McCartney. "But I expect my wife and I will play with it as well."

Pert as a field lily, Bobby and Ethel Kennedy's eldest daughter Kathleen went forth to meet the photographers on the occasion of her 16th birthday, wearing a size 8, art-nouveau print shift. Right beside her stood another of the Kennedy birthday girls, wearing an identical, size 8 print shift, with a pair of white-mesh mod stockings thrown in for kicks. "You can say I'm 72," joked Rose Kennedy, "but please don't mention that it came from me." So the Boston Globe printed that she was 72 and didn't say it came from her. What more gracious present could it give her on her 77th birthday?

Off with his family for a weekend in the West Virginia mountains, Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, 55, paused along the Cacapon River, fell into conversation with Douglas Dolan, a postmaster who owns property there. Suddenly a shout went up that two of Dolan's nieces, Deborah, 12, and Nancy, 21, were being swept downstream by the rain-swollen current. The Secretary stripped to his shorts, plunged into the river, overtook the girls and held them steady in the swirling water until a motorboat could get to them. "I was about to go under for the last time," said Debbie, "and Nancy was as bad off as I was." As he was drying off, Wirtz said simply that he had "repaid a favor." Fourteen years earlier, he explained, his own son Philip, then three, had been rescued from just such a predicament in Lake Erie by a fast-moving doctor named Jonas Salk.

"I have turned my palace into a prison," cock-a-doodled Surrealist Painter Salvador Dali, 63. "I am not allowing myself any kind of distraction. Look at my television set: I have turned it upside down and put a distorting filter in front of it." Could he be working at something? Si, si, nothing less than a vast canvas 15 yards square, "a study of tuna fishing" that will be ready for exhibition in the fall. And when he is not painting, he continued, he keeps busy photographing God. "God invented man and man invented the metric system," Dali explained. "So to get an image of God, all I need is to photograph a perfect man and a precise meter."

Ever since it was announced that the elegant old dowager was retiring, her friends have wondered how she would spend her sunset years. Playboy Publisher Hugh Hefner considered asking her to join his bunny empire, and New York's Mayor Lindsay definitely hoped to have her for his Board of Education. S.S. Queen Mary, 33, ended up going to the city of Long Beach, Calif., which will transform her into a hotel and maritime museum. Long Beach's bid of $3.4 million was about $1,000,000 better than any other, said Cunard Lines Chairman Sir Basil Smallpiece, and "insures that her character will be preserved." Rejected suitors may now transfer their pitch to Mary's younger sister Elizabeth, 27, who will be looking for a quiet home next year.

After all these years, he passes some sort of milestone every time he walks into the office, but last week was something special. Half a century had passed since John Edgar Hoover first reported for work at the Justice Department as a $1,200-a-year clerk. Now 72, and the only chief the FBI has ever had, Hoover marked the anniversary in characteristic fashion--working at his desk from 9 a.m. till past 6 p.m., and breaking only for a quiet lunch at the White House with L.B.J. and Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

"Their marriage was like forget it, but the divorce is a poem," crooned Syndicated Society Columnist Suzy in her latest bulletin from the Mediterranean, where ex-Spouses Charlotte Ford, 26, and Stavros Niarchos, 58, with 14-month-old Baby Elena, sailed aboard Stav's 190-ft. schooner Creole. Since divorce ended their 15-month marriage in March, the jet set's odd couple has toured Europe and Africa together, may be pushing their luck on the Creole--where their zigzag alliance got going in the first place.

Author, editor, amateur athlete and semi-pro bachelor, George Plimpton, 40, can whistle up a date with just about any girl including Jacqueline Kennedy. But for this occasion he needed the one perfect woman to witness his return, in a charity softball game, to Yankee Stadium, scene of the personal annihilation he described in Out of My League. So George wooed and won Poetess and Baseball Maniac Marianne Moore, 79, who looked on indulgently as Pitcher Plimpton retired three inept opponents. Once George's tomfoolery was out of the way, though, Diamondologist Moore settled purposefully into the press box, with George at her side, to cheer through 18 innings of the regular Yankees-Twins night game, finally permitted Plimpton to escort her home at 1:30 a.m.

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