That was quite some interview that the Beatles' John Lennon laid on the fortnightly Rolling Stone. Hacked of hair and short of beard, John said his Goodbye to All That in some 24,000 unchosen words, accompanied by a running obbligato from Wife Yolco Ono.

Highlights: "The dream is over. I'm not just talking about the Beatles. I'm talking about the generation thing. It's over, and we gotta--I have to personally --get down to so-called reality."

Heroin? "We sniffed a little when we were in real pain. We took 'H' because of what the Beatles and others were doing to us. But we got out of it. You see, I presumed that I would just bring Yoko into our life, but it seemed that I had to either be married to them or Yoko, and I chose Yoko, and I was right. They insulted her and they still do."

How about LSD? In 1964, "a dentist laid it on George, me and wives, without telling us, at a dinner party at his house. It went on for years--I must have had a thousand trips. I used to just eat it all the time. I think George was pretty heavy on it; we are probably the most cracked. Paul is a bit more stable."

Was it fun being famous? "The bigger we got, the more unreality we had to face. The most humiliating experiences were like sitting with the Mayor [sic] of the Bahamas, when we were making Help!, and being insulted by these f--ing, junked-up middle-class bitches and bastards who would be commenting on our work and our manners. One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that's what I resent."

As did Jules Verne's legendary globe circler, Phileas Fogg, 98 years ago, U.S. Humorist SJ. Perelman plans to step out of London's Reform Club and go around the world in 80 days. No more, no less. Fogg, said Verne, employed "steamers, railways, carriages, yachts, merchant vessels, sledges, elephants." As far as possible, 66-year-old Circumnavigator Perelman will confine himself to such modes in following Fogg's itinerary. In place of Fogg's famed manservant, Passepartout, Perelman prefers female traveling companionship. Though he has had "five applications for the post from various birds," he says, "I have in fact chosen my secretary." No bet, though. The payoff, like Author Verne's, will be a book.

President Nixon's favorite Shakespeare is Frank--the aggressive TV executive who became head of the U.S. Information Agency in 1969. Last week blond, boyish Frank Shakespeare, 45, unminced some words about the occasionally strained relations between USIA and the State Department. "Secretaries of State," he said, William Roqers take note, "have for too long been lawyers trained to negotiate quietly and announce only the results. But the world has gone well beyond that. So I come out as an advocate of the U.S. Government, taking advantage of communications in its foreign policy." As for the Russians: "Very effective in selling a product substantially without merit."

Georgia's constitution bars the state's Governor from succeeding himself, so it was time last week for headline-happy Lester Maddox to leave the $3,000,000 Governor's mansion he built, step down to the lieutenant governorship and garner some finger-lickin' sweet publicity in the process. He invited folks to drop in and say goodbye--and 5,000 of them came. He dramatized the fact that the Lieutenant Governor is not provided with a car by riding his bicycle seven miles to the state capitol. And he announced some plans for augmenting his income: the manufacture of Lester Maddox wristwatches, a Maddox doll and a Lester-in-the-box that utters the guv's all-purpose expletive: "Phooey!"

"Just Old Friends?" was the caption the New York Daily News slapped on its front-page photo of Princess Margaret's Lord Snowdon and a slight bit of chic called Lady Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs having rather serious fun at a London party. For the past year, according to the News, Tony, 40, and Lady Jacqueline, 24, have been a steady twosome, and during his recent hospitalization (for a hemorrhoid operation), "it was Lady Jackie who visited him even more often than Margaret." Last week, as the rumors flew, sometime Fashion Model Jacqueline left England for Switzerland, sometime Fashion Photographer Tony worked in a wheelchair at Kensington Palace, and Princess Margaret and the two children visited Queen Elizabeth at Sandringham. Jacqueline's mother, Lady Reading, denying all, called the reports "absolutely ridiculous," but from Princess Margaret's official spokesman, Major John Griffin, it was: "As far as I know, there is no romance. Denials were issued several days ago, when there were rumors of a divorce, and the position is still the same as far as I know."

Honeymooning with Bride China Lee, 28, a onetime Bunny trainer, Stand-Up Satirist Mort Sahl, 43, invited the press to his Playboy Club Apartments penthouse in London and let fly. Mort's missiles zapped, among others: President Nixon ("If you were drowning 20 feet offshore, he'd throw you an eleven-foot rope and point out he was meeting you more than halfway"); Movie Stars Dustin Hoffman, Elliott Gould and Richard Benjamin ("If any of those guys had been my roommate in college I couldn't have gotten him a date"); his host, Playboy Hugh Hefner ("He says 'Be a playboy, have a ball,' but the guy has had only three girls in all the 15 years I've known him").

The several telephones in Martha Mitchell's Watergate apartment bear no numbers--a security-conscious precaution against the curiosity, and possible calls, of casual visitors. The one exception is the most famous phone in Washington: the one in Martha's bathroom. How about that? Ha, chuckled the Lady of the Long Lines, "that's a fake. The real number is one of those written on the wall."

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