The bachelor popularity of owlish Henry A. Kissinger, President Nixon's one-man think tank, has earned him the White House sobriquet "playboy of the western wing." Last week his reputation was appraised by pretty blonde Washington Hostess Barbara Howar. Said she on-camera to TV's Mike Wallace: "Mike, it takes time to be a swinger, you know. Henry doesn't have that kind of time. If he's taking you out to dinner, don't start to get dressed until the third time he's called to say he's on his way. If he's taking you to a dinner party, tell him you'll meet him there, or you'll never get to eat because you'll never make it for the first course."

Looking heavier and a little more gray, Senator Eugene McCarthy turned up in San Francisco last week to raise some money for Democratic candidates with a speech and a poetry reading. Political plans? He would not be the Republican presidential candidate in 1972, but "beyond that, all possibilities are open." Political reminiscence? "Whenever we got too serious about the '68 campaign, I quoted Yeats' poem Politics, which concluded: 'But O that I were young again and held her in my arms!' " Poetry? From his forthcoming volume, Other Things and the Aardvark: "I am alone/ in the land of the aardvarks./ I am walking west/all the aardvarks are going east./They are behind me/ They have grown fat on the Tree of Knowledge/Their world is empty of park and green."

The Japanese royal family had a ball at the Gakushuin Kindergarten annual autumn games when four-year-old Prince Aya managed to take the play away from one of his classmates right in front of his proud oapa-san and mama --Crown Prince Akihite and Princess Michiko.

"How does one get to be a liberated woman?" someone asked Martha Mitchell at a political fund-raising party in Miami Beach. Cracked the lady who U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell calls "my unguided missile": "You marry the Attorney General and he protects your First Amendment rights. What the hell's better than that?" But when someone in Las Vegas asked her fellow Republican Barry Goldwater about equal rights for women, he offered a different kind of fantasy. "God put both sexes on earth, and each has its own purpose," he said. "I'd hate like hell to wake up next to a pipefitter."

Still smarting from Vice President Spiro Agnew's characterization of maverick Senator Charles Goodell as "the Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party," Christine nevertheless did her best to be ladylike. "No, I don't have one of those Agnew dart boards," the blonde pioneer of sex-switchery told an inquirer. "I think it's wrong and disrespectful to put any elected official on a dart board. But I think it's rather interesting that he says I'm in the public domain, but that he apparently considers himself out of the public domain, because his lawyers are now threatening the dartboard company."

Jungian Psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Henderson decided there was gold in his files in the form of 83 drawings and doodles made 30 years ago by one of his patients, the late painter Jackson Pollock.

So he sold the lot to a San Francisco gallery, and last week Manhattan's Whitney Museum made an exhibition out of them. Since neurotic, alcoholic young Pollock was not trying to produce art but to get help, it is not surprising that the drawings are no more interesting than any other spray of surrealist symbolism. Equally unsurprising was the reaction of Pollock's widow: that the public display of such material was in regrettable taste.

The handsome, gilt-edge executive on TV's new detergent commercial sits at a desk with shelves of leather-bound books behind him and a red-white-and-blue box of laundry detergent in front. As the camera dollies in, he removes his half-moon reading glasses and there is former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall himself, saying, "I believe that Sears' new Phosphate-Free Laundry Detergent is a real breakthrough. For our water's sake, I hope you use it." Ecology-Freak Udall says he will make other commercials, as well as speeches, pitching for the new product. His pay? It will all go to a scholarship fund for American Indians.

Reminiscing on the David Frost Show about the good old days, 82-year-old Maurice Chevalier remembered some that were not so good. There was a time in '21 or '22 when he was "drinking a little too much and loving much too much and working very, very hard." At one performance, he blew his lines --a failure that so unnerved him that he went to a sanitarium. "I had a gun. And suddenly, like the crazy man I had become, I put the gun in my mouth and started to play with it." Stepping back from suicide that time, Chevalier said, gave him the strength to return to the stage and "the 50 more important years of my life."

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