L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's unhurried newspaper, has just published the news that on March 3, 1890, Buffalo Bill met Pope Leo XIII. Seems Bill Cody was on tour with his troupe, and was standing in St. Peter's Square when the Pope passed by. The two did not speak, noted L'Osservatore; yet "the Pope observed Cody with curiosity, and when he passed before him, the great explorer bowed deeply while receiving the papal benediction." No story ran then because it was not an official audience. But now it could be told: L'Osservatore was reviewing a new book, Buffalo Bill, True and False, by Italian Author Giuseppe Rivarola.

While a formation of three old Stearman biplanes droned over San Mateo, Calif., the Hamilton Air Force Base band burst into Anchors Aweigh. The flyers of the U.S. Air Force -and Navy, along with half a dozen civilian aviation groups decided it was high time to pay tribute to Snoopy, pilot par excellence and fearless scourge of the Red Baron. As the peerless pup's creator, Cartoonist Charles Schulz, stood at attention, they gave him a pair of gold wings and a picture of Snoopy in fighter-pilot gear. It was too bad that Snoopy could not be there in person, said Schulz. "He's on his way to the moon. The last time I heard from him, he was over Petaluma, and he told me, 'You can tell when I'm on my return because I'm facing the other way.' "

Melina Mercouri was so indignant she quivered. And when Melina quivers, strong men have been known to develop palpitations. They did more than that in Italy, where she was campaigning to rouse opinion against the dictatorship in Greece. In Genoa she gave such an incendiary speech ("Hurrah for Liberty! And for all those tortured by the colonels, those thousands locked up in concentration camps! Re-si-sten-za!") that crowds stoned the Greek consulate and battled police. Next she turned up in Turin, where extreme left-wingers used the occasion to pelt police with paving stones, overturn cars and generally raise a ruckus. In Athens the government shrugged off her campaign. "She is just a has-been."

Rumors had been buzzing that if Norman Mailer won a National Book Award this year, he would turn it down in a gesture of defiance to the Establishment. But when Mailer was named winner in arts and letters for The Armies of the Night, he accepted. Not for him the self-denial of Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused a Nobel prize in 1964. "Sartre said he did not want people to refer to him as Sartre the Nobel prizewinner, but just as Sartre," Mailer recalled. "The fact is, the bourgeois call him Sartre the perverted existentialist, so if he had taken the prize, he would at least be known as Sartre the perverted existentialist Nobel prizewinner."

Relations between the BBC and No. 10 Downing Street could hardly have been characterized as cordial in recent years. But last week there were signs of a thaw between the Harold Wilsons and "Auntie." First, the PM was featured in a friendly BBC radio interview in which he reminisced about his 25 years in politics. Next day, Mary Wilson was on a program which centers around what to save in case of shipwreck. Each celebrated castaway is allowed one book, eight records and one luxury. Mary Wilson's book: Wuthering Heights. Her records: selections ranging from Faust to English country dances. And her luxury? "A complete makeup set, just in case a ship came along to rescue me."

Their music was pure "bluegrass," with Lester Flatt fingerin' away on the guitar and Earl Scruggs handling the five-string banjo. For 21 years they toured the country-music circuit, had their own radio show, and were rediscovered by pop America for their background music that was very much in the foreground of Bonnie and Clyde. Now Flatt, 54, and Scruggs, 45, have announced they are breaking up the act. Just why, they would not say. Friends report that the two have never been close, and now that both are well off financially, they see no reason to stick together. Said one acquaintance: "They have come to hate each other's guts."

"When I was a boy," the guest conductor told the orchestra, "there were four very good young violinists here in San Francisco. One was Isaac Stern, one was Ruggiero Ricci, one was Yehudi Menuhin, and the fourth was Joe Alioto. I know what happened to the first three--but what ever became of Joe Alioto?" Among other things, he grew up to be mayor of San Francisco. Now he was before the San Francisco Symphony, telling jokes on himself and preparing to lead the orchestra through the opening number of a benefit performance. The mayor, who still practices his violin at home, did so well the orchestra members gave him a resounding wave of applause.

Daddy-O is his nickname in Paris. But marriage, it appears, has hardly slowed Aristotle Onassis on his appointed rounds of the city's nocturnal watering holes. "Come postmidnight, dusk or 4 a.m., and there is Daddy-O, taking large gulps of refreshing nightclub air somewhere on the Left Bank," wrote the London Evening Standard's Paris correspondent. Among his recent companions: Actress Elsa Martinelli and her photographer husband, Henri Dubonnet of the aperitif family, the Maharani of Baroda. And Jackie-O? Last week Mrs. Onassis was reportedly winging into Paris to disengage Ari from the spas and take him to the Canary Islands for a bit of sun.

A schoolmarm in tweed skirts and sensible shoes? That hardly sounds like Britain's Vanessa Redgrave, protester for all reasons. Still, she is starting a school for children in England. "We've got all kinds of ideas of what the school should be" says Vanessa, "but I think we should learn from the children themselves." One course is already set: Swimming. "The wonderful thing about swimming is that it's the only natural environment in which a child can be totally independent from an adult; water is a natural element." After all, says the new pedagogue, "a child sort of bubbles away in the womb, doesn't it?"

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