In the most improbable of auto accidents, a two-tire wheel assembly detached itself from a trailer truck on the Long Island Expressway and smashed into a limousine carrying Gary Grant, 64. The accident mashed the priceless Grant nose, bruised his expensive ribs, and dispatched the actor for nearly a week's stay at St. John's Hospital, where he shared a semiprivate room with the limousine's driver. Also hospitalized: Gratia von Furstenberg, 23, a cousin of Actress Betsy von Furstenberg, who was accompanying Grant to the airport to see him off, and wound up at St. John's instead with a fractured leg and collarbone. Said Cary: "I feel like a Grade B movie."

Life at Cambridge is an eye-opening experience, wrote Britain's Prince Charles, 19, in a maiden essay for the undergraduate newspaper Varsity--particularly at 7 a.m., when the "head-splitting clang" of garbage cans is "accompanied by the jovial dustman's monotonous refrain O Come, All Ye Faithful." After reading that, the Cambridge Urban District Council promptly rerouted Dustman Frank Clarke so that he appeared under the prince's windows at 9 a.m. rather than 7. "I am a bloke who likes to sing at his work," admitted Clarke. "But I think 7 o'clock is time enough for anyone to be up and on parade."

Touring French Singer Francoise Hardy signed autographs for the crowd in Johannesburg, but she was only a spectator herself, waiting outside Groote Schuur Hospital for Philip Blaiberg, 58, world's only living heart-transplant patient. With Surgeon Christiaan Barnard looking on from the doorway, and Wife Elaine at his elbow, Blaiberg took his first breath of fresh air after 74 days in germ-free isolation, then walked to a limousine that carried him home. Ahead lay a careful, publicity-free regimen at his apartment in the suburb of Wynberg, with no visitors for a month, no telephone calls and thrice-weekly examinations by Barnard and his team. He will pass the time, said Blaiberg, beginning a book on his medical adventure.

Playwright William Gibson, 53, best known for The Miracle Worker, is a demon letter writer as well. He heard the talk about 206,000 more troops for Viet Nam and fired off a guided missive to the Berkshire Eagle from his home town of Stockbridge, Mass. "I am offering in all sobriety a reward of $25,000," he wrote, "to anyone who devises and successfully executes a plan to draft Lyndon B. Johnson, put him in uniform complete with butterfly net, and ship him off to the rice paddies." Potential applicants for the prize may be put off by Gibson's payoff record: he volunteered to play honky-tonk piano at a local fund-raising benefit for Senator Eugene McCarthy--and reneged the moment the McCarthyites tried to take him up on the offer.

The scene was a crowd stopper: a man in Pope's raiment was kissing a pretty young girl. But it was only Actor Anthony Quinn, 51, dressed as the fictional Pope Kiril I in the movie version of The Shoes of the Fisherman, bestowing a paternal peck on Daughter Catalina, 25, when she visited the set in Rome. That little respite notwithstanding, Quinn is living his role with fierce dedication--so much so that shooting had to be stopped two weeks because of a huge swelling of Quinn's right eye that he is convinced was psychogenic. "It used to be called 'Monk's disease,' coming from the effort to measure up to a great task against the weakness of the flesh," Quinn said. "Playing a Pope is the epitome of everything an actor can do. I think of myself as a professional, but sometimes professionalism doesn't seem enough."

Britain's canine quarantine regulations were no problem at all for Actress Gayle Hunnicutt, 24, mistress to two Yorkshire terriers named Cathy and Heathcliffe. Gayle simply packed the tiny, heavily tranquilized beasts in a carryall and lugged them past customs at London Airport. Some such illegal dodge was necessary to get around England's strict six-month waiting period for animal immigrants, which recently forced Richard and Liz Burton to charter a yacht to house their animals during a visit. The less expensive tote bag was Gayle's own idea. So was her final coup--getting a British European Airways steward to carry the bag for her as she left London for Majorca.

"The creator has become an anticreator and his greatest achievement is to discover how he can leave out some thing that has never been left out before," noted disenchanted Cultural Guardian Joseph Wood Krutch, 74, in the American Scholar. Take Twiggy, for example--"a fashion sensation because all the secondary sexual characteristics of the female were totally lacking." And the Twig is only part of the pattern, Krutch said. "The miniskirt is halfway to becoming a non-skirt. When it has reached its entelechy and is then designed to accompany a topless blouse, the anti-costume will be complete and just right for the non-woman reading anti-novels, looking at nonrepresentational pictures, and listening to atonal music."

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