It was time to move, so Washington Hostess Barbara Howar, onetime social fixture of Lyndon Johnson's White House, decided to do things in her own noisy way. Instead of shifting all the junk from one place to another, she advertised a garage sale, opened the doors to her Georgetown establishment and attracted a block-long line of some 2,500 eager souvenir hunters. Barbara offered such items as: a leopard-skin rug ($60), a bathtub full of used cosmetics (two for 5-c-), a 125-piece set of Wedgwood china ($800), an old telephone that "Henry Kissinger made several important calls on" ($15), some plastic table mats (25-c- each), some old birth-control pills (two for 5-c-) and a familiar object hung over the fireplace and labeled, "Historic second-hand toilet seat and lid used at one time or other by George McGovern, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Gore Vidal, Yevtushenko and Gloria Steinem. $50." "All this fancy stuff doesn't appeal to me any more," Barbara explained after netting $15,000. Her next appearance: a memoir entitled Laughing All the Way, to be published on April Fool's Day.

It was "fascinating and exhilarating . . . Everywhere, you see the strong foundations for a better future being boldly, laboriously, intelligently laid. Whether in agriculture or industry, you find eye-popping achievements." What hath God wrought? The words are those of none other than Columnist Joseph Alsop, talking about China. A patrician conservative who long described the Peking regime as though it were directly ruled by Satan, Alsop recently toured the old battlefields, where he had served with the Chinese Nationalists during World War II. He found himself hugely impressed by the industrial growth and disciplined spirit, and he took such copious notes ("a v-A-A-S-T accumulation") that he was still publishing his paeans under Chinese datelines almost a month after his return to Washington. As for his apparent change of heart toward the old enemy: "The only basic opinion I changed is that it does work a great deal better than I had supposed. I can't say I shed any illusions."

The audience was "the cream of Central Casting," said Bob Hope, adding: "This place looks like a living wax museum." The occasion: the 100th birthday of Adolph Zukor, who imported the U.S.'s first feature movie (Queen Elizabeth, starring Sarah Bernhardt), and founded Paramount Pictures. "I don't see many movies today," said Zukor, hunched over his cane, "because my eyesight isn't too good. I would work in pictures today if I were a young man." Zukor accepted homage from people like Alfred Hitchcock, James Stewart, Jack Benny, Diana Ross and Michael Caine. There were rose petals (70 packages of them), a rope of flowers and a real live Dorothy Lamour, escorted by two chimpanzees named Bob and Bing. Columnist Earl Wilson asked some guests whether they would like to be 100. "I don't think so," said Bette Davis. "Yes, but I'd only admit to being 90," said Zsa Zsa Gabor.

After Cavalry Lieut. Mark Phillips spent two successive weekends as a guest of Britain's Princess Anne at Sandringham House, London gossips were atwitter at the prospects of the first British royal wedding in more than a decade. The twitter grew louder when the lieutenant, sailing off for a two-year tour of duty in Germany, bade a warm dockside farewell to the Princess in full view of stevedores, soldiers and security guards. "They were just like any other couple saying goodbye to each other," said a guard. "They were two nice little kisses." But to talk of an impending engagement, Phillips replies, is "absolute rubbish."

The authorities in Geneva cannot register a birth until the baby has a name, but Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren were so sure that their second child would be a girl that the only name they had picked was Sophia Penelope--which would hardly do for a 7-lb. 4-oz. bambino. While the actress convalesced from the caesarean, the Pontis brooded over more manly names for a day or so and finally chose Edoardo Gianmaria Leone. It comes from nowhere and no one in particular, says Ponti. "We just thought it was a nice name."

Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn may be too celebrated to imprison, but there are other ways for the Kremlin to harass rebellion. The Soviets have just thrown a smokescreen over Solzhenitsyn's novel, August, 1914, by publishing 100,000 copies of Barbara Tuchman's 1962 history of the same period, The Guns of August. (Mrs. Tuchman, who was neither consulted nor paid, said the Soviet tactic was "absurd" because "Solzhenitsyn and I come to much the same conclusions.") As another harassment the Russian Supreme Court undertook to review Solzhenitsyn's 1971 divorce decree from his first wife--and reversed it. That prevented him from marrying his companion, Natalya Svetlova, and legitimizing their two sons.

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