In American Journey, Jean Stein's new book about Robert Kennedy, Washington's grandest grande dame, crisp, canny and perennial Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 86, contributes her own distinctive views about the difference between Bobby and John F. Kennedy: "I see Jack in older years as the nice little rosy-faced old Irishman with the clay pipe in his mouth, a rather nice broth of a boy. Not Bobby. Bobby could have been a revolutionary priest."

Another novel with a homosexual theme? Ho-hum. But Maurice, announced last week for publication in about a year, is by the late great English novelist E.M. Forster, and so rates as a major literary event. Written in 1913, Forster's sixth novel was withheld by the author of A Passage to India until after his death because, according to his literary executor W.J.H. Sprott, "He thought there would be some stir about it and he did not want to be involved." Forster's own homosexuality is dealt with movingly by his authorized biographer, P.N. Furbank, in the current issue of Encounter. "He achieved physical sex very late," writes Furbank, "and found it easier with people outside his own social class; and it remained a kind of private magic for him."

Speaking last week to an earnest audience of some 400 females at a Manhattan conference on women and management, pear-shaped Columnist Art Buchwald declared with a straight face that "I'm as sympathetic as anyone to Women's Lib. I know from personal experience what it's like to be treated as a sex object." The interesting thing, Buchwald said later, is that nobody laughed.

Live television can be quite lively, as viewers of the British version of David Frost's talk show discovered last week. In mid-interview with Yippie Jeer-leader Jerry Rubin, some 30 Yippie yahoos stormed the studio stage, screeching obscenities, knocking over equipment, squirting Frost with water and insults ("You are a plastic man. You have been dead for years"). The host retreated first to the audience, then to another studio to continue his showwhile switchboards lit up with calls from indignant Britons and TV officials asked each other how those awful Americans had managed to get in. Frost's verdict: "The most powerful commercial ever for law-and-order."

Vienna has no road company of Oh! Calcutta!, but it does have a picture of England's Queen Elizabeth II with no clothes on. To the "personal regret" of the Austrian Foreign Ministry the picture of the royal nude even appeared last week in the Vienna Express. Not that the Queen actually posed that way for Photographer-Painter Roland Pleterskithe Elizabethan body in his painting belongs, in fact, to a model named Shin-Tan. The work, Pleterski claims, was an act of admiration. "I chose to do the Queen rather than, say, Jackie Onassis, because she is more important and so much nicer."

Kipling's unmeetable twain have been getting together with a vengeance in Bangkok. The American presence meant money and automobiles; automobiles meant roads. So the exotic "Venice of the East" filled in most of its famed canals and turned itself into a miniature Oriental Los Angelescomplete with fume-spewing, bumper-to-bumper thrombosis. To the rescue last week, during a two-day official visit to Bangkok, came U.S. Secretary of Transportation John Volpe. His prescription, typical of the inscrutable West: fill in the few remaining canals and add express buses.

Can a suicidal female pop singer find happiness in the arms of a Roman Catholic priest? Sophia Loren finds out. So does the padre assigned to straighten out Sophia, Marcello Mastroianni, who eventually discovers that he needs some straightening out himself. It all happens in the new movie The Priest's Wife, which Producer Carlo Ponti decided to make without counting on any plugs from the Vatican's Osservatore Romano.

Swathed in sober respectability, Actor Richard Burton celebrated his 45th birthday with presents from Queen Elizabeth (the order of Commander of the British Empire) and Wife Elizabeth (a Rolls-Royce saloon). He also ruminated on retirement: "When I really want to slope off and simply be garrulous in my old age, I shall go back to the South Wales village I came fromPontrhydyfen. Elizabeth will still be superbly dressed, but the double chin she has had from childhood will become a third chin, and she'll be asking me to get her a vodka and tomato juice at 10:30at night, I hasten to add instead of 6:30 as at present." On money: "We both try to live up to the rules of easy wealth. Elizabeth treats it all as fairy money. She scatters it. I am pretty cute business-wise. Some time ago, I went into a deal with two Swiss gnomes and an industrialist and set up a bank in Switzerland. So I am a banker, and a better banker than any you will find in New York or London."

Black Militant Angela Davis, 26, currently in a Manhattan jail fighting extradition to California to face kidnap and murder charges for her alleged complicity in a shootout in which four were killed, was selected Honorary Homecoming Queen at California's predominantly white Sacramento City College.

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