Thanks largely to the London police, Beatle John Lennon's first exhibit, at the London Arts Gallery, was a smashing success. The law charged the gallery with showing indecent pictures. By the time the case was tossed out of court, there had been enough publicity to satisfy the most ambitious press agent. Crowds flocked in to see John's line drawings of himself making love to his Japanese wife Yoko Ono. Sold: 296 sets of 14 lithos, for a total artist's commission of $84,000.

With a mother's natural interest, Princess Grace of Monaco--Grace Kelly of Philadelphia, that was--stopped by the Marika Besdrasova ballet school one day last week to make a careful personal appraisal of how her two student daughters were doing. As a five-year-old beginner, Princess Stephanie Marie Elizabeth was still struggling with her jetes. But her older sister, Princess Caroline Louise Marguerite, displayed cool and graceful evidence that at 13, she has all the requirements for a professional career. Mother and father --Prince Rainier, that is--have no objections. As for Caroline, she is just doing it for the exercise and the fun.

For Zubin Mehta, the temptation was irresistible. Vacationing with his wife in northern Kenya, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's conductor was treated to a native concert by members of the Turkana tribe. Mehta listened intently to the rhythm: the click of bottle-cap anklets on wildly swinging legs, the imperious clatter of bamboo sticks, the thunderclap of hands, the keening from scores of female throats. Then, having convinced himself that he had picked up the beat, he raised his practiced arm and for a few fascinating measures conducted some of the world's oldest and most primitive music.

It was 1930, Dress-Up Day at California's Whittier High School, and the young senior who was masquerading as a panhandler cheerfully posed for the photographer along with his favorite girl, Ola-Florence Welch. Quite thick they were, too: the youthful romance lasted through four years at Whittier College, where the two were classmates, and even beyond. Then somehow the friendly couple drifted apart, and Dick Nixon found and married someone else. But this month, reports Parade magazine, the President and his first love, now Mrs. Ola-Florence Welch Jobe, 58, will meet once again--at the White House, where Whittier College's class of '34 will observe its 36th anniversary in the present home of its most famous graduate.

It was an angry letter--and possibly the last manuscript from the pen of Mark Twain. He died six months after writing it in 1909 to a fellow author and dear friend, William Dean Howells. In the letter, Twain complained at incredible length--some 400 pages--of how he had been bilked by two employees, one of them a secretary with the power to cash her boss's checks. The letter, discovered by a niece of Twain's wife, was sold for more than $25,000 last week to the New York Public Library.

Fortune frowned on a surprising catalogue of prominent people last week. Among the losers: Muhammad Ali, alias Cassius Clay, who lost a unanimous decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to let him go to Canada for a fight with Joe Frazier; Lady Bird Johnson, who was fined $15 by Austin, Texas, police for failing to yield the right of way; Ray Fosse, Cleveland Indians catcher, who suffered burns on his foot when a cherry bomb was thrown from the stands during a game.

After three weeks of hard work as an apprentice mountain-climbing guide at Washington's Mount Rainier, Joseph Kennedy III, 17, oldest son of the late Senator Robert Kennedy, admitted, "I still get tired." The new hand is described by his boss Lou Whittaker, brother of Everest Conqueror Jim Whittaker, as "bigger than average" (6 ft., 190 Ibs.) but with "good coordination." Last week young Joe had a chance to show just how good he is by easily maintaining the brisk pace set by his mother Ethel as they breezed halfway up the slopes of Mount Rainier.

There the name was on the list of Cambridge University graduates, sandwiched between Vaux, J.E.G., and Walker, J.N.G.: Wales, H.R.H. Prince of --the first heir to the British crown ever to earn a university degree. No one seemed one whit prouder than Lord Butler, master of Trinity College, where the royal scholar won a bachelor's degree with honors in history. "We think it was rather remarkable that he could get a good degree," said Lord Butler, "considering all his other duties."

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