One is known for a mean left and the other for a mean write, but last week Norman Mailer and Truman Capote were on their best behavior. Only bons mots and canapes were passed around at a Manhattan discotheque party celebrating the publication of Southern Baptist Dotson Rader's new book Miracle. To get in the spirit of things, Dotson and a friend sang hymns between disco numbers. "Why not? After all, television mixes apples with astronauts," opined Mailer, 55, who is writing a book about Gary Gilmore, the executed murderer. "It's a new angle," agreed Capote, 53, who is called the "Tiny Terror" for rattling the skeletons of his celebrity friends in his novel-in-progress Answered Prayers. Capote's next book, he says, will be about "a disastrous love affair I had." The T.T.'s proposed literary style: high comedy.

The verdict was thumbs down. Henry Kissinger did not like the portrait painted by Boston Artist Gardner Cox. One viewer thought it made him look "somewhat a dwarf," and another pronounced it "a rogues' gallery thing." Not surprisingly, the Government, which had commissioned the art to hang in the State Department with Cox's portraits of former Secretaries Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk, rejected it. "We felt that the portrait lacked Mr. Kissinger's expression--the dynamism which exudes from him," said State Department Curator Clement Conger. Cox will be paid $700 in expenses--but not his $12,000 fee.

She never understood, shrugs Carol Burnett, the success of her CBS variety show: "When a good movie is on, I watch it instead." But audiences always loved hard-luck Eunice and the other antic victims Burnett has played for eleven years, 286 programs. Alas, The Carol Burnett Show signs off the air this week. "It's classier to leave before you're asked to go," says Burnett. How does she explain her durability on the tube? Maybe, she says, it is because she has a "tinge of being amateurish" and is just an ordinary "whitebread woman." Audiences might say enriched.

While New York Senator Pat Moynihan strives to become a Washington mogul, Wife Elizabeth has been boning up on the Indian model. Ever since her days in New Delhi, where Pat served as U.S. ambassador in 1973-75, Elizabeth has been fascinated by Mogul gardens and by Baber, the founder of the Mogul dynasty. Inspired by his journals, Elizabeth went back to India in hopes of finding the site of his fabled lotus garden. With the aid of a village wise man, she discovered a Mogul-style well and an octagonal pool 37 miles south of Agra. "I was jumping out of my skin," she says. Back home last week, Elizabeth proudly discussed her find: "It's as if in America we found a new Mount Vernon that Washington had built, or in England a new castle built by William the Conqueror."

On the Record

Luigi Barzini, author (The Italians): "We might be the first developed country to turn itself back into an underdeveloped country."

Bill Bradley, New Jersey candidate for the U.S. Senate on always being labeled a basketball star: "I suppose some day, when I've served in the Senate with some distinction and am visiting Russia, I'll read, 'Senator Bill Bradley, the former New York Knick, met today with Leonid Brezhnev.' "

Carlo Maria Giulini, as he got ready to take over his post as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic: "I always think I am a very small man. When I shave myself, I look in the mirror and see behind me Beethoven and Brahms."

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