Back in the 1950s, before the telly really took over, all England seemed addicted to a BBC radio program called The Goon Show, which was the making of Actor Peter Sellers, among others. When the Goons got together again to do a special program for the BBC's 50th birthday, Sellers brought four "friends": Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon and Princess Anne. Another royal Goon fan, serving with the navy in the Mediterranean, sent his regrets: "Last night my hair fell out, my knees dropped off, and I turned green with envy at the thought of my father and sister being there. Charles."

After its two-week tour of the U.S., the Chinese table tennis team had plenty to tell the home folks about the ways of the mysterious West. In Ann Arbor, Mich., for instance, the visitors scurried for shelter as a welcoming group of radicals bellowed in Chinese, "Down with American imperialism!" And at a ballet performance in Manhattan, they listened sympathetically as Actor Dustin Hoffman observed: "It must be very difficult for you to come from China, where the spirit is so high, to here where the spirit is so low."

Melvin Belli, 64, the dapper and orotund lawyer who has had a lifelong love affair with the public eye, was visiting Washington's Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts when a hostess singled him out. "You're a very famous lawyer, aren't you?" asked pretty Lia Triff, 23, a student at the University of Maryland. Belli beamed. "Your name begins with a B," said Miss Triff. Belli swelled with such pleasure that, as Lia put it later, "I couldn't resist. I said: 'I've got it --you're F. Lee Bailey!' We had lunch the next day, and the rest is history." They will be married (he for the fifth time, she for the first) on June 3.

First he demanded $115,000. Then $92,500. Then $70,000. Then, Pitcher Vida Blue announced that he was retiring from baseball at the age of 22 to sell bathroom and kitchen fixtures. Nobody believed him, least of all Oakland A's Owner Charles O. Finley, who paid Blue a cut-rate $14,750 last year. Finally, after four months of haggling, Blue signed for $50,000 plus $8,000 for his college education and a $5,000 bonus for winning 24 games last season. "I'll be lucky if I win ten games this season," said Vida. How did he keep in shape during his layoff? "I chased a girl around the lake the other day."

Hollywood's dark-haired onetime sex symbol, doe-eyed Hedy Lamarr, claims that the book billed as her "autobiography," Ecstasy and Me, My Life as a Woman, is "an obscene, shocking, scandalous, naughty, wanton, fleshy, sensual, lecherous, lustful and scarlet" treatment of her life. So for the second time she slapped a libel suit on its publisher and two coauthors, whom she accuses of distorting interviews with her --this time for $21 million. Still no cigar. The New York Court of Appeals has dismissed the case--not because the book isn't obscene, shocking, scandalous, etc., but because her lawyers failed to prove that the actions leading to publication had occurred in New York.

Seattle Attorney Edward Rauscher was vacationing at Vancouver's Bayshore Inn where the elevator doesn't stop at the 19th and 20th floors because Howard Hughes lives there. One day, though, somebody in the elevator with Rauscher playfully pushed 20. By some electronic glitch the number lit up on the indicator. "When I saw that 20 light up," says Rauscher, "I knew I had from one to 20 seconds to think about what I was going to do." He decided to ask Hughes for a donation to his favorite charity, PONCHO (Patrons of Northwest Civic, Cultural and Charitable Organizations), which raises money by auctioning donated items. Rauscher never saw the Invisible Man, but he did see a guard, who sent him to a man on the 19th floor, who sent him to a third man on the 20th floor, who gave him an address in Los Angeles, and five weeks later PONCHO received four round-trip tickets on Hughes Airwest between Seattle and Las Vegas ($664), plus $300 worth of rooms and entertainment at Hughes' hotel, the Sands. Moral: Even if you don't think you'll get there, push the button anyway.

Crowned heads have saved themselves more than once by deploying their secret weapon, the Royal Glare. A case in point was what Australia's former Prime Minister John Gorton describes as "one of the greatest fun evenings I can remember." On a cruise off Queensland on the royal yacht Britannia, "people decided that everyone else ought to be thrown in the water," says Gorton. Prince Philip was thrown in, and then Princess Anne. I was sitting beside the Queen. I was about to throw her in, but I looked at her and there was something in the way she looked back . . ."

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