"I just love my nose--goes with the setting," said the masked guest, tilting his twelve-inch rubber proboscis toward the Tiepelo frescoes on the ceiling of Venice's Palazzo Ca' Rezzonica. It was the season's gaudiest Ballo in Maschera (masked ball), and more than 500 of the plumiest knights and dames of the international round table had donned their most expensive armor to dance, taste champagne, guess each other's identities and incidentally raise money for the Venetian artisans still suffering the effects of last November's widespread floods. When the masks came off at 1:30 a.m., the revelers turned out to include: Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, Aristotle Onassis, Gian Carlo Menotti, Paul Getty, Princess Alexandra of Greece, three Princesses Ruspoli, Rose Kennedy, Clare Boothe Luce, Sonny and Marylou Whitney, who wore rhinestones in honor of her recent $780,000 jewel theft, and Richard and Elizabeth Burton, who had dispatched a plane first to Sardinia and then to Rome to fetch the proper dress for the ball. Amidst all the gaiety, practically no one noticed that the ball raised only $40,000 for the beleaguered Venetian artisans--a donation of less than $80 per Beautiful Person. But after all, did not the Tiepelo nose belong to Douglas Fairbanks, and was it not swizzled in his champagne by Vicomtesse Jacqueline de Ribes, charter member of the jet set--and was that not what a Ballo in Maschera was really all about?

There was clearly a screw loose somewhere, but luckily not in the car. Down the straightaway of the Indianapolis Speedway at 160 m.p.h. whooshed the revolutionary, turbo-powered machine that had run away with the last "500" until breaking down eight miles from the finish. The driver: TV Comic Johnny Carson, 41, whose racing experience has consisted mostly of running after taxicabs in the rain. Carson came away from the stunt with (in descending order of surprise) his life, six usable minutes of film for his show, and increased respect for big-car racing. "Boy, you put your life in your hands every time you go out there," he said. "It's kind of like television."

Said Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, 52, as he wearily prepared to return from Tel Aviv to the word wars at the U.N. General Assembly in Manhattan: "If the Arab League made a motion at the U.N. Assembly that the world was flat, they would get 40 votes for it."

All she really wanted, she kept saying, was to be able to return to her beloved husband, Indonesia's deposed President Sukarno, 66, but the forces of evil have conspired to keep them apart. While she waited, Ratna Sari Dewi, 27, the Bung's fifth wife, has been living in Tokyo for ten months, but now even Japan has become unbearable. "What with all that smear about me in Japanese weeklies, I haven't had a day of repose," complained Dewi, disclosing that she had filed suit against the publisher of a novel about a former nightclub hostess who marries an Asian President. For consolation, Dewi has packed up six-month-old Kartika Sari and flown off to New York City and the hospitality of Cindy Adams, wife of a nightclub comedian and author of an as-told-to autobiography of Sukarno.

The financier whom the President has called "our country's No. 1 bond salesman" was in Washington to confer with the Treasury Department, and

L.B.J. introduced him to White House reporters. "No one," said Johnson, "has done more to help us work with our economy" than Leslie T. Hope, 64, a wealthy, California-based cosmopolite whose unpaid avocation is promoting U.S. Government bonds. In a curiously disjointed response, the salesman touched on Shirley Temple Black's campaign for Congress ("Ev Dirksen is the only one who complains that one set of curls in Congress is enough"), gave informal confirmation to suspicions that he is a White House intimate. "Lynda looked just marvelous," said Hope, nicknamed Bob, "and I'm sure she and General Robb will be happy."

A guy can get hungry whirlybirding around South Viet Nam, and Bobby and Ethel Kennedy have all those kids of their own, and--well, it was worth a try, anyway. So Army Specialists 4/C Michael Garrity and Thomas Mooney sent a wistful note to the Senator: "Can Ethel make cookies?" Bango! Back across the Pacific came an enormous box of cookies. Bingo! Off went another note, this time to the White House: "Can Lady Bird make cookies?" They're waiting, and so's the whole 269th Combat Aviation Battalion.

"One idea I want to get rid of," said Theatrician Peter Ustinov, 46, "is that of Actor Ustinov coming in to save a fragile bauble--a script by Writer Ustinov." By way of making his point, Ustinov is looking on as his new play, Halfway Up the Tree, opens this season in five productions in four countries in three languages--and he won't have a role in any of them. Lest he seem totally idle, he will direct the New York version, hop over to London occasionally to watch Sir John Gielgud direct that company, shove on to France to listen in on his own translation, and maybe catch the productions in Berlin and Diisseldorf for a change of pace. "It's bad," said Ustinov. "I'll be living in airplanes. But at least I won't have to play Wednesday matinees."

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