In the nation's capital the topic, naturally, was the Democratic White House steeplechase, and two front-row spectators, ex-Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Columnist Joseph Alsop, found themselves offering advice and opinion to each other at a Georgetown dinner party. Democrat Acheson made no secret of his partiality to Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson as the ablest of all the Democratic presidential candidates. Alsop volunteered: "Why, I'd do anything to make his nomination possible." "Excellent, Joe," retorted Acheson tartly. "Attack him!"

Out of the Army, ex-Sergeant Elvis Presley unlimbered his hips and returned to work. The sideburns were gone, but otherwise it was the same old Elvis, and he had RCA Victor crowing about a record 1,275,077 advance orders of his first postmilitary disk, Stuck on You. Already on TV tape was a slight spectacular that Elvis recently made with Crooner Frank Sinatra for a trifling $125,000. He could expect more petty cash from Stuck on You and its memorable lyrics. Sample: Ah'm gonna stick like glue--stick because Ah'm stuck on you, Ah'm gonna run ma fingers through yer long black hair--An' squeeze you tighter than a grizzly bear . . .

Still looking pale and sickly after major abdominal surgery (TIME, March 28), British Laborite Aneurin Bevan, 62, issued assurances that he has no plans to write his memoirs, then took a spirited swipe at those who so much as read that sort of thing. He singled out a favorite target: Britain's Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Said Bevan: "I understand that Macmillan reads political biographies. I have never been able to achieve that credulity. My experience of public life has taught me to know that most of them are entirely unreliable. I would rather take my fiction straight."

The human side of some very dissimilar papas was laid bare in a book titled The Father: Letters to Sons and Daughters, edited by Evan Jones and published last week (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $3.95)In 1950, not long after his young daughter Isabel had gone to Paris and succumbed to "the romantic alchemy" of a much older, married man, Humorist Ogden Nash wrote a prescription: "Keep on having your gay time, but just keep yourself in hand, and remember that generally speaking it's better to call older men Mister." In 1930, India's Premier Jawaharlal Nehru was serving the fifth of his nine terms in British jails. Wrote he to daughter Indira on her 13th birthday: "On your birthday you have been in the habit of receiving presents and good wishes.

Good wishes you will have in full measure, but what present can I send you from Naini Prison? My presents cannot be material or solid. They can only be of the air and of the mind and spirit, such as a good fairy might have bestowed on you--things that even the high walls of prison cannot stop." In 1931, Humorist Ring Lardner rose from bed at 3 o'clock one morning and, in affectionate doggerel, banged out a plea to his son, the late Newsman John Lardner, then studying in Paris after a year at Harvard: "And now when you think it isn't too much bother/ You might write a letter to sincerely your father." In 1947, when Britain's Queen Elizabeth (then a princess) was honeymooning with Philip, she got further fatherly blessings from the late King George VI: "I am so glad you wrote & told Mummy that you think the long [three-year] wait before your engagement & the long time before the wedding was for the best. I was rather afraid that you had thought I was being hardhearted about it ... Our family, us four, the 'Royal Family' must remain together with additions of course at suitable moments!!" Seventy-five years after he was born there and 40 years after he made the town famous, Sauk Centre, Minn. (pop.

3,140) began to celebrate the diamond anniversary of Novelist H. (for Harry) Sinclair Lewis. Sauk Centre, the "Gopher Prairie" of Lewis' famed Main Street, was originally outraged by the book, but now wears the scar as though it were a beauty mark. The high school athletic teams even go under the name of "The Main Streeters." Anticipating a horde of summer visitors, the town fathers recently changed the name of Main Street to "The Original Main Street," and the name of Third Street, on which Lewis was born, to "Sinclair Lewis Avenue." One of a handful of surviving Lewis contemporaries, Ben Dubois, now secretary of the Independent Bankers Association, reminisced last week about life near little Harry. Said Dubois: "My first memory of Harry Lewis is when we were four or five years old and our parents were visiting the Lewises. We were put out on the lawn to play. Harry looked at me and said, 'I can eat grass.' And he did. He gnawed off about a foot square, and I knew he was destined for great things." The young "Red" Lewis would surely have scoffed at the sentiment now being displayed toward him by the town that he made a symbol of provincialism. But the older, mellower Lewis would just as surely have been pleased--for he loved Sauk Centre as much as he hated it, and in his later years he could grow misty-eyed as he recalled: "Sauk Centre always smelled of wild roses." Awarded by a New York court last week: $500,000 to the firm of Manhattan Lawyer Luke B. Lockwood, one of the two administrators of the estate (estimated at upwards of $120 million) of Philanthropist Vincent Astor. Lockwood's firm also represented the estate against the will-breaking efforts of Astor's half brother.

John Jacob Astor, who settled for a relatively measly $250,000.

At 6:45 a.m. a handful of Londoners, irked at being awakened by jet aircraft flying over their houses near London Airport, last week pounded on the front door of a Vincent Square town house. Roused by the knocking was Aviation Minister Duncan Sandys, who emerged, rumpled and in a dressing gown, to be confronted by placards reading "Ban Night Jet Flying!" Explaining that he could do nothing about the nightly noise, Early-Riser Sandys then went back inside, but not to bed.

In the current issue of Harper's Bazaar, Photographer Richard Avedon tries to show that all women possess a quality that he calls "The Sphinx Within." With seven international glamour girls as his subjects, Avedon got them to look slinkily feline under a variety of hairdos purporting to be Egyptian. He achieves his most eye-catching effect with Heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, thereby moving another glamorous tigress, New York Mirror Society Chatterist "Suzy" to comment: "When they make her a plain jane on those TV potboilers, they spoil a good thing." Said Harper's Bazaar of Avedon's gallery girls: "They belong to women who are sloe-eyed to the soul." For years, most Swedes have believed that Heavyweight Boxing King Ingemar Johansson, 27, and pretty Birgit Lundgren, 23, were much too friendly ever to get serious about each other. But in Stockholm last week, "Ingo" surprised nearly everybody by slipping a plain gold engagement ring on Birgit's finger. Recently back from Egypt, he was asked how much Birgit would fetch on the bride market there. Replied he: "A thousand pounds and 100 camels."

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