In a revealingly pensive mood, Old Groaner Bing Crosby, 54, crooned some honest parental doubts to the New York Herald Tribune's Hollywoodsman Joe Hyams. "I guess I didn't do very well in bringing my boys up," brooded Bing. "I think I failed them by giving them too much work and discipline, too much money, and too little time and attention. I never had much success talking with them. The thing is, it burns me up when they won't listen to me." To the four Crosby cutups (Gary, 25, Twins Philip and Dennis, 24, Lindsay, 21), Dad's mournful tune came as a stunning surprise. Said Cinemactor Lindsay: "I don't know why he made the statement. No one meant to do any wrong, and we're all working hard."

The Chinese Communist government notified New Zealand Mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest, that owing to unexplained "inadequate conditions,'' he would not be allowed back in Tibet for another go at the great peak.

From his Hampshire home, doughty Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, 71, whose forthright expressions of opinion often seem equally harsh on friend and foe, announced a new project: a trip to Moscow to look over "this conflict between East and West." Trumpeted Monty: "I want to talk to these people to see what they think about it all." Did the field marshal think his, ah, straight-forward approach might smooth things a bit? "I certainly shall not make it worse."

For Boston's aging (40), terrible-tempered Slugger Ted Williams, the coming of spring carries inevitable splinters of physical woe. Last week, a fortnight after he first winced at a pain in the shoulder, Red Sox Star Williams shambled glumly into Boston's Lahey Clinic. Doctors studied his pinched nerve, began treatments. Ever-hopeful Ted, who has been benched almost a dozen times in his long career by such ills as a broken collarbone, a fractured elbow, ankle sprains and virus attacks, hoped to be at the season's opener, April 10.

Dolled up to the royal nines, glowing, velvet-eyed Princess Soraya, 26, ex-wife of Iran's Shah, paid a formal call on the proud old Roman family of the man whom the gossipists keep saying she will marry: handsome, unwealthy Prince Raimondo Orsini, 27. But Vatican and Iranian court circles frown on the romance, and Raimondo's low income seems no match for Soraya's high tastes. The betting of Romans in the know: no wedding.

After long months of tolerance, the House Patronage Committee grew weary of the lowly paper-folder on the House office staff (salary: $4,000 a year) who had been eased onto the payroll by Pennsylvania's late, sympathetic Democrat Herman Eberharter. With little ado, the committee decided that the nation could henceforth do without the services of brassy John Maragon, 65, onetime Kansas City bootblack, who connived his way to a reputation as one of the Truman era's sleaziest five-percenters.

On a two-week break from prayer meetings on his Down Under "Crusade for Christ," Evangelist Billy Graham went out for a dip in the Pacific surf at Broad-beach, Australia. Later, tanned and rested, he flew off to New Zealand, stirred 3,000 welcomers with a message of hope: "If Christians around the world unite in prayer, we could avert war. We don't have anything in common racially or politically. One common denominator we do have is spiritual."

Back in Hollywood for the first time since 1949, when she flew off to make movies and love with Roberto Rossellini. Cinemactress Ingrid Bergman, accompanied by her third husband, Producer Lars Schmidt, flashed her cloudless Nordic smile on newsmen. And what of the rumor that Ingrid was pregnant again? Her parry: "That is really a question between God, my husband and myself."

When Prince Charles, after two weeks of quarantine at Cheam School, bounded home for the Easter holidays, Queen Elizabeth noted a royal flush. Doctors decreed bed and isolation from the rest of the family until Bonnie Charlie recovers from a princely case of chickenpox.

Along a corridor of the lush Cecil Clinic in Lausanne, Switzerland, paced Prince Rainier, furrow-browed. He need not have worried. In less than 30 minutes Monaco's radiant Princess Grace was wheeled in and out of the operating room, where Philadelphia Surgeon James Lehman snipped out her mildly inflamed appendix, then happily pronounced Her Serene Highness "in first-class shape."

Long before dawn, near the side of the road in Scottsdale, Ariz., the cops came upon the parked car and its occupant, slumped drowsily over the wheel. Police sniffed the afterglow, hauled the occupant in for a drunkometer test. Then, under a state law allowing such arrests even though the car may not be moving at the time, the cops booked angered, aroused Rancher Elliott Roosevelt, 48, of Scottsdale for drunken driving.

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