"London Bridge is going up," sang the 58-voice elementary school chorus. It was indeed, but more for the purpose of attracting tourists than accommodating traffic. The city of London had sold its slowly sinking span for stone-by-stone reconstruction in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., a new town of 3,000 on the Colorado River, and Sir Gilbert Inglefield, Lord Mayor of London, was there for the cornerstone laying. Resplendent in black velvet and heavy gold braid and accompanied by his official sword-bearer and macebearer, he was honored by Governor Jack Williams at a dinner for 400, including that noted Tory Barry Go Id water. Next day Jesus Esquerra, an Indian chief whose Chemehuevi tribe once owned the land, presented Sir Gilbert with a robe and headdress and rechristened him "Ha-utu-nu-wu-mu-hwint," meaning "Leader of a Noble People."

George Wallace got a plug last week from a surprising source. Said Cassius Clay: "I admire the man. He tells the truth, and he don't beat around the bush. Besides, he would unite Negroes." So many other folks go all the way for George that London bookmakers last week shortened the odds against his winning from 50-1 to 12-1.

In 17th century Dutch, his name means "the king," and no one in The Netherlands was about to let Painter Willem de Kooning forget it. Back in his homeland for the first time since he sailed to the U.S. as a deckhand in 1926, the 64-year-old abstract expressionist confessed, "I was afraid to come back, but I was wrong." Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum was aglow with 90 De Kooning oils, and idolizing crowds trailed him everywhere. The only problem was that he had forgotten his mother tongue. After U.S. Ambassador William Tyler addressed the opening-night crowd at the Stedelijk in impeccable Dutch, De Kooning admitted: "I could not understand one word of what the ambassador said, but I thanked him for his kind words."

Four months after her husband's assassination, Ethel Kennedy has settled back into the family's Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Va., to await the birth" of her eleventh child, expected around Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, she keeps busy on new plans to build a nondenominational chapel in memory of Robert Kennedy at Waterville Valley, N.H., where the family spent its last ski vacation together on Washington's Birthday. The $80,000 to $100,000 needed for the chapel, which will go up on a plateau looking out at one of the Senator's favorite ski slopes, will be raised by public subscription.

The red dome light flashing behind him did not belong to some friendly police car escorting him to a movie premiere. So Hollywood's Burt Lancaster pulled up his red Mercury and was approached by a pair of California highway patrolmen, who informed him that he had been driving at 55 m.p.h. in a 45-m.p.h. zone. O.K., Mac, here's a ticket. Burt refused to accept it, explaining: "I want to get an education." He was taken to the county jail in Los Angeles, where he refused to post the $65 bail and spent the night in a cell. Obviously he is a quick teach. By 8 a.m., he considered himself sufficiently well-educated to hand over the bail, summon a taxi and go home. He refused to say what he had learned, but just wait for his next movie about the fuzz.

The biography of President Warren G. Harding by Historian Francis Russell will finally reach the bookstores next month after much litigation, but history buffs are in for a disappointment. The Shadow of Blooming Grove has some important omissions. Blank spaces are used in a dozen or so places, wherever the biographer attempts to quote from Harding's love letters to Ohio Matron Carrie Phillips. Harding's nephew, Ohio Psychiatrist George T. Harding III, got a court order prohibiting publication of them. Readers will just have to use their imaginations.

In the mid-1930s, he used to pick up $5 a game, playing first base for the Watkins, Minn., Independents in the Great Soo League. There, Eugene McCarthy was known as a fancy-Dan fielder and batted close to .350. Since he joined the Senators, he has often starred for the Donkeys in the annual game between congressional Democrats and Republicans, and he still gets wound up for hours discussing baseball and his all-time favorite performers, among them Gil Hodges and Ted Williams. Friends report that McCarthy is not so much interested in the outcome of a contest as in the style of individual players. Even during his recent political campaign, he carried a mitt along and used his Secret Service men as a captive team. Now, fresh from two weeks on the French Riviera, the old slugger comes home to a logical assignment: covering the World Series for LIFE.

Doctor Zhivago made him a star, but to Omar Sharif it was just another Hollywood moneymaker. The film that the Egyptian movie hero is now making in Hollywood, Che!, is quite another thing. With his scraggly beard and cigar, Omar is a ringer for Ernesto Guevara and really feels for him. "Che was a just man fighting for a good cause," says he. "If he had not used violence, he would have been one of the great men of the world."

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