By E. Graydon Carter

Swing. Splash. Surprise. No one was more surprised than First Lady Nancy Reagan, 59, at the successful christening of the 560-ft. guided-missile cruiser U.S.S. Ticonderoga at the Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss. Said she: "All I could think of was 'Lord, I am going to go down in history with Mrs. Truman!' " First Lady Bess Truman had struck out when she tried to crack a champagne bottle against the nose of the C-54 U.S. Capitol in 1945. Though that plane got no kicks from champagne, this ship did. Nancy, a righty (natch), uncorked a swing with enough brut force to christen not only the Ticonderoga, but herself and a few onlookers. The scouting report on Mrs. Reagan: a good spray hitter.

It is hard to recognize him without his custom-made porkpie hat and Dick Tracy suits, but that almost affable-looking skipper is former Tough Guy Mickey Spillane. Though he still has a mug that would halt traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, it may be that the gravel-voiced master of hard-boiled detective fiction has finally gone soft. Spillane, 63, has taken to writing children's books. His first, The Day the Sea Rolled Back (Bantam, $1.75), is about two boys on a search for buried treasure. They run into a couple of villains who might have felt at home in any one of Mickey's eleven Mike Hammer mysteries. The bad guys are grownups, of course. "Kids always see adults as villains," says Spillane. "Other kids are just someone to play with."

Tipped off by another competitor, a female official at the Miss U.S.A. Pageant in Biloxi, Miss., hauled Deborah Fountain, 25, Miss New York State, backstage and unceremoniously yanked down the top of her swimsuit. Gads! It turned out that Deborah had added a little, er, pomp to her 35-23-35 circumstance. Explaining that she had lost 15 lbs. after the recent death of her younger brother, Miss New York admitted that she had padded the suit's bra with foam. When the strategy bounced back, Miss U.S.A. organizers expelled her from the competition. Fountain countered that some of her peers had cantilevered their chests with permanent breast implants. Contestants flatly denied the charge, and pageant officials went on to select as Miss U.S.A. Ohio Beauty Kim Seelbrede, 20.

Since there is nothing like a dame, only a cockeyed optimist could confuse Bob Hope with the real thing. The comedian shed his golf togs and donned a tropically fruity outfit for this week's NBC-TV special celebrating his 78th birthday and the 40th anniversary of the U.S.O. During the taping at West Point before 25,000 cadets, officers and onlookers, Hope sprang eternal. He sparred with Sugar Ray Leonard and teamed up with Mary Martin, 67, to reprise a number from South Pacific. "If I entered the Miss U.S.A. contest,"said Hope, "I'd probably get disqualified for the coconuts."

--By E. Graydon Carter

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