Visiting China for the first time in 30 years, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein failed to recognize a bush-bearded chap whose portrait hung on the wall of a textile factory in Peking. Informed that it was a likeness of Karl Marx, Montgomery snapped: "He needs a haircut." Monty's general impression of China after five days: "There are great misconceptions in the Western world about the new China. I find the Chinese people to be happy and cheerful, whereas in the West it is considered that the Chinese people are very depressed and unhappy." Then he handed the Reds a blockbuster to drop in their campaign to seize Nationalist-held Formosa: "I always consider that there is one China--and that China must be the one in which the government is in Peking, and that Taiwan [Formosa] is a part of China. This seems to be sensible."

Forthright and articulate about art, reticent about himself, Russian-born Painter Marc Chagall, 72, long a French resident, arrives in the U.S. to get an honorary doctor's degree next week at Brandeis University. Sounding somehow like a Somerset Maugham character, he told a Manhattan newswoman: "When one is young, one thinks of a goal in art. One talks. One reacts--as I did against cubism. But when one is older, one does what one does. One doesn't talk." Why does he still paint things reminiscent of his native city of Vitebsk, a good half-century after his departure? Replied Chagall, who believes that most artists pick their basic themes early in life: "Cezanne took apples. Monet took trees. I was born where there were no trees or apples--only frozen apples--to take. So I took what there was." Emphasizing his view, he added: "Gauguin went to Tahiti, but the Gauguin who painted before Tahiti remained. Van Gogh in Holland--The Potato-Eaters--is very important. Experience, yes. Gauguin had an experience. But experience is not a passport to the company of Rembrandt." What is? "Genius."

Negro Outfielder Willie Mays finally decided that San Francisco is a good place to play baseball--but he doesn't want to live there. When the Giants moved to San Francisco after the 1957 season, Mays bought a $37,500 home in the all-white Sherwood Forest district. Almost no Sher wood Foresters came to be friendly toward Mays, his wife and their adopted son; many continued to snub them. This week the Mayses, having sold their San

Francisco house, were comfortably ensconced in a 15-room home in suburban New Rochelle, N.Y., where residents of the all-white neighborhood turned out to greet the family. Reported price: about $60,000.

On trial in Montgomery, Ala. for failing to report some $7,000 of income in his 1956 state tax return, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Negro minister and integration strategist, was acquitted by an all-white jury.

France's Nobel Prizewinning Novelist null Mauriac doubles as a weekly TV columnist for Paris' L'Express, and his views of the medium are seldom saccha rine. Last week he watched a program, filmed at the recent Cannes Film Festival, featuring volcanic Soprano Maria Callas and France's ethereal Jack-of-All-Arts Jean Cocteau. Mauriac was fascinated by Callas and her "small, flat head, truly reptilian. I was frightened for Jean Cocteau when I saw him hurry to that sort of cobra at the risk of being swallowed."

Ill lay: Soviet Author Boris Pasternak, 70, abed for weeks with grave cardiac and gastric ailments, reported to be suffering also from cancer of the left lung, not diagnosed earlier because Pasternak refused to permit Soviet doctors to examine him.

Asleep: French Cinemactor Jacques Charrier, 24, jealous husband of Brigitte Bardot, put into a drug-induced, month-long trance because Brigitte's on-camera love scenes had led him to threaten whole sale murder and his own melotraumatic suicide.

When the Hollywood Improvement Association inscribes the names of some of Hollywood's past and present stars on a stretch of pavement to be known as "the Walk of Fame," one film great will be conspicuously missing: Charlie Chaplin, now 71 and living in Switzerland. Chaplin was left off the list because some of the project's backers recalled that he left the U.S. after being accused of Red ties and moral turpitude. But his exclusion from the Walk of Fame last week drew protests from some of Hollywood's solidest citizens. Cried Mary Pickford: "We make ourselves ridiculous to the rest of the world by ignoring the world's greatest comedian." Added a remarkably grammatical Sam Goldwyn: "I don't believe he's a Communist. I believe he's a capitalist, and I know him better than anybody else." Said conservative Boulevardier Adolphe Menjou: "He's too great to keep his name off despite the fact that he has a hole in his head politically."

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