A 1952 Italian law stipulates that the widow of a Prime Minister gets a 50% higher pension than the widow of an ordinary Minister. So one 81-year-old woman is suing the government for a raise in her pension from $258.40 to $387.60 a month. After all, Husband Benito Mussolini was Italy's Fascist Prime Minister from 1922 to 1943 (he was eventually shot by anti-Fascist partisans and then hung by his heels alongside his mistress). When Italian newspapers questioned whether the dictator's widow really deserved more money--plus the return of three Mussolini farms that the government had confiscated--Donna Rachele retorted: "Non facciamo ridere i polli" (literally, "Let's not make the chickens laugh"--meaning "Don't be silly"). -

In a delightfully improbable piece of casting, Raquel Welch is going to play that blank-eyed, block-bodied moppet of the comic strips, Little Orphan Annie, in a CBS-TV special called Funny Papers. Annie's superrich, superreactionary guardian, Daddy Warbucks, will be portrayed by Carroll O'Connor, the Archie Bunker of All in the Family. "We got into a little discussion about just how sexy Daddy Warbucks was," said Raquel. "We wondered how close he should get to Little Orphan Annie, and whether we should indicate that there might have been a little something going on between them. It turned out that Daddy Warbucks is straight city, but Carroll O'Connor is pretty sexy. We compromised and played it halfway close."

Lucky Matthias! Papa Willy Brandt, Chancellor of West Germany, was finally finished with those earnest confabulations with President Nixon and had taken him to the brand-new Disney World at Orlando, Fla., where Mickey Mouse himself turned out to show him around. Forty-four-year-old Mickey (enacted by a Disney employee) and ten-year-old Matthias, in a T shirt decorated with a big, stars-and-stripes "USA," walked around hand in hand, moving diplomacy into a new dimension.

If the scales of justice weigh heavily on a Chief Justice of the United States, so sometimes a Chief Justice weighs heavily on the scales. Especially if he is retired, like Earl Warren, 80, who has checked into Southern California's posh fat farm, La Costa, to slough off 15 lbs. in two weeks of diet and exercise. And who should be outside the doctor's office on the first day but his old friend Actress Olivia de Havilland, 56. "I was so moved to meet him again after all this time," gushed Olivia, also in for two weeks and 15 lbs. "He's the most darling man--I've had a crush on him for 35 years."

Latest additions to the annual January infestation of lists include the traditional couturier-cum-socialite choice of Best-Dressed Women (No. 1: the Begum Ago Khan, No. 2: Mrs. Ronald Reagan); Fashion Designer Mr. Blackwell's Worst-Dressed women (No. 1: Actress AM MacGraw, No. 2: Jacqueline Onassis); the Motion Picture Herald's poll for 1971 Box Office Star (No. 1: John Wayne, No. 2: Clint Eastwood); Dr. Joyce Brothers' radio poll for Most Sex-Appealing Men (No. 1: Vice President Spiro T. Agrtew, No. 2: Actor Paul Newman); and the Fashion Foundation of America's categorized roster of Best-Dressed Men, which inexplicably contains such rumpled misfits as Aristotle Onassis for "international society" and Walter Cronkite for "communications." Said Newscaster Cronkite: "This distinction was earned entirely by straightening my tie and putting on my jacket just before the TV camera turns on."

Strolling disconsolately along London's Bond Street, Author Anthony Burgess was accosted by a friend who wanted to know why all the gloom. He was on his way, said Burgess, to dine with Producer-Director Stanley Kubrick and to see A Clockwork Orange. But why the long face, asked his friend, since the film --made from Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name--is the hit of the year? "Precisely," said Burgess. "I sold the screen rights long ago for a few hundred dollars."

To dramatize an Administration plan to purchase 565,000 acres of Florida's Big Cypress Swamp for a federal water reserve, Interior Secretary Rogers Morton and Presidential Daughter Julie Eisenhower went swamp walking--right up to the edge of an alligator hole. No alligators. So Julie slogged around happily in her borrowed hip boots. "The water felt good," she chortled. "My feet were hot."

Millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, 72, called a press conference to tell the world that even though he had not been asked to fill the vacant post of U.S. Ambassador to Spain, he was not going to take the job because the ten-month period remaining until the presidential election was too short "to enable me to accomplish anything enduring." After November, though, if anybody cares, "I speak tourist Spanish with a Mexican accent, but I'm taking lessons."

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