In irreverent observance of Mother's Day, the New York Herald Tribune took a look at the current crop of Broadway offerings, published tidings that Mother is having heavy going onstage right now as the ideal of every red-blooded American boy and girl. In five dramas now seething in Manhattan, Mom is depicted as a mean lady, a monster, or absolute family nemesis. The quintet: Bye Bye Birdie, Five Finger Exercise, Gypsy, Toys in the Attic, Once Upon a Mattress. Interviewing some of the stage mothers involved, the Trib also learned that any actress can forgive herself for playing an unsympathetic role. As Kay Medford, the all-possessive Mom of Bye Bye Birdie, saw it: "I've never been a mother, so I wouldn't know what mothers are supposed to be like." Added Ethel Merman, offstage mother of two, who plays the self-serving, star-making mother of Gypsy Rose Lee and June Havoc: "Why, Jerry Lewis sat there one night after the show and cried for 15 minutes, and George Jessel cried too. To them, she was a sympathetic woman."

In a Rome-to-Sicily road race last year, top-heavy Cinemactress Anita Ekberg, in her blue Lancia Flaminia sports car with Italian Actor Antonio Gerini at the wheel, rolled into the town of Castrovillari, was soon surrounded by ogling male fans; in the crush and Gerini's subsequent attempts to drive on, ten fans were slightly injured. Last week she explained it all to a Calabrian court. After conceding that she is 28, Anita admitted to an admiring judge--and packed courtroom--that she had bowled over a few of the boys. But she staunchly denied that a popped button on her blouse had triggered the stampede. Purred Anita: she had all her buttons and only ran abreast of the crowd because "some people tried to poke their hands through the car window--for what purpose, I don't know."

Tart-tongued Harry Truman, nearing his 76th birthday at week's end, attended a mock Democratic Convention at Virginia's Washington and Lee University.

At an air show in West Germany, Bonn's Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss climbed into a British Hawker Hunter, was whisked to 43,000 ft., broke through the sound barrier, then was brought down to buzz a Hannover airfield at a risky 100 ft. After receiving a diploma citing him as "Germany's fastest minister," Strauss jowled: "I felt safer than on the Autobahn!"

Denmark's Sculptor Jean Gauguin, 79, lives in a Copenhagen suburb, minds his own business, and seldom talks about his famed father, Painter Paul Gauguin, who went to Tahiti in 1891, died in the South Seas twelve years later. But recently, when a Danish art critic came to call, Jean molded a few details. "He was a small man," recalled Sculptor Gauguin. "His sailor's papers say 162 centimeters [5 ft. 3 1/2 in.]. I believe he used high heels. He was rather boring and tedious, terribly ceremonious, difficult and fussy." Pressed for more, Jean said: "They also tell me that he gave me a penknife back in 1890, but I threw it away, of course."

Off to federal prisons last week for two-year terms went Matthew J. Connelly, 52, Harry Truman's White House appointments secretary, and T. Lamar Caudle, 56, North Carolina lawyer and head of the Justice Department's tax division under Truman. Both were convicted in 1956 of conspiring to fix the Justice Department difficulties of Irving Sachs, a St. Louis shoe wholesaler, who evaded $118,142 in federal taxes.

Returning to their French country home after their annual pilgrimage to the U.S., the Duke and Duchess of Windsor got off the boat train in Paris, issued a chilly "no comment" when asked about their absence from Princess Margaret's wedding. The Windsors opened up enough to disclose that they will visit London shortly for a two-day, "strictly business" trip, then swept off to a weekend in the country with friends and their four omnipresent pugs: Disraeli, Trooper, Davy Crockett and Impy.

To its favorite capitalist. Cleveland Industrialist and self-styled Statesman Cyrus Stephen Eaton, 76, the Kremlin awarded an honor only slightly below that of Hero of the Soviet Union: a Lenin Peace Prize, theoretically worth about $25,000. Said Tass, apparently saluting Eaton for the informal East-West conferences that he holds at his Nova Scotia retreat: "A public figure whose activity is an example of courageous service to the lofty idea of peaceful coexistence." Glowed Eaton: "Such recognition of a capitalist provides strong new evidence of what I am sure is the sincere interest of the Soviet people and their government in peace for all mankind."

Out in Arizona, Novelist Aldous Huxley, 65, made hour-long noises of gloom and doom for an Arizona Republic newshen, who felt so dejected toward the end of the interview that she asked him if there was anything right with the world. Huxley brightened. "Plenty. The fact that you're still here is a bit of all rightness." Then he disclosed that he is hard at work on a new novel about a "utopian society, opposite from that of" his depressingly automated Brave New World, now 28 years old.

Remnants of some 300 watercolors and oils painted by a late Austrian artist in his youth--two papers listed as Lots 174 and 174A--were auctioned off at London's Sotheby & Co. The paintings, badly copied from postcards of half a century ago, presented a tourist's-eye view of Vienna's Parliament and Ringstrasse, another of the Karlskirche. Sotheby's made an agreement with the owner, a Viennese matron, that its commission and half of her proceeds from the sale would be donated to the U.N.-sponsored World Refugee Year. But even so, at the West German embassy in London, one official promised to burn the paintings if he could lay hands on them. When the auction began, a London gallery owner named Jacques O'Hana (a Spanish-born Jew) leaped to his feet and cried: "These pictures should not be offered for sale! But I'll give -L-50 for the two and tear them up!" His bid was insufficient. The two paintings were knocked down for $1,680 to a less excited London book dealer, who bought them for the private collection of the Marquess of Bath. The artist who stirred up all the fuss, his name neatly printed on the lower right corner of both works: A. Hitler.

Among 13 Pulitzer Prizes awarded in the arts, journalism and letters, a salute went to prolific Naval Historian Samuel Eliot Morison (his second Pulitzer) for his biography, John Paul Jones. The hit musicomedy Fiorello!, written by indefatigable (at 70) George Abbott with Jerome Weidman, was the third musical ever to win such an award (the others: Of Thee I Sing and South Pacific). Outstanding in the field of international reporting: the New York Times's A. M. (for Abraham Michael) Rosenthal, who was ordered to leave Poland for probing too deeply into its internal problems. One of the least surprising and most deserved awards: to Allen Drury for his bestselling novel. Advise and Consent, on official Washington. In England last week ex-New York Timesman Drury was asked for his views of U.S. presidential candidates, answered like a true statesman. On the Democrats: "Johnson, Stevenson, Kennedy and Humphrey are all intelligent men and would make good Presidents." As for the G.O.P.: "Nixon has some principles of his own'' and could be "one of the most liberal Presidents we ever had. He could be very independent of the conservatives."

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