After taking in his first bullfight. Tourist Jack Paar, 42, hastened to a ranch outside Madrid to film his own version of the corrida--with a cow. But once Novillero Paar had made his classic entrance, a wag decided to cow him with a substitute, a real toro--a dilemma on whose horns the comedian had no desire to be impaled. Not realizing that his foe was a specially trained, docile beast, Jumping Jack bolted for the barrera but, unfortunately, he didn't quite clear it. His award: no ears, no tail, no hoofs, two bruised ribs.

Although his father was one of the most renowned Hamlets, John Barrymore Jr., 28, has never been notably Shakespearean. But last week he made Barrymore-sized headlines after a sub-balcony performance worthy of a Greenwich Village Romeo and Juliet. At 5 a.m. he insistently rang the doorbell of his ex-fiancee, Italian Cinemactress Giorgia Moll, 21. Barrymore announced himself as the apartment porter, but Giorgia's mother, not the least bit fooled, had the cops called. When John Jr. was later haled into court on charges of housebreaking and defamation, the whole thing became clear--more or less. Giorgia, it seemed, was an old-fashioned Italian gal who believed in keeping her engagement ring, as a sort of consolation prize, even after her engagement was broken. As for John Jr.: "I need the ring to get engaged again." His new Juliet: another Italian brunette beauty, ex-Model Gabriella Palazzoli, 22.

Ending a two-year Mississippi hegemony, radiant Nancy Anne Fleming, 18, of minuscule (pop. 2,346) Montague, Mich, found herself Miss America of 1961. While she was sewing up the title with victories in the talent (dressmaking) and bathing-suit (35-22-35) preliminaries at Atlantic City, her Governor, Democrat G. Mennen Williams, was campaigning in New Jersey for Jack Kennedy. Although he missed her crowning, "Soapy" slipped into town in time for the subsequent Coronation Ball and a dance with his comely constituent, who magnanimously labeled it "my second biggest thrill of the night."

Looking mighty like a man--and the spitting image of his older brother, King Hussein of Jordan--Prince Hassan, 13, deplaned at London Airport with his mother, Queen Mother Zaine, for the start of school. The natty young prince will attend Harrow, which Winston Churchill attended 68 years ago, and where Hussein matriculated for a year, made the soccer and rugby teams before moving on to Sandhurst.

From London last week came details of Aly Khan's will, which, under "the Shia Moslem law, which is my personal law," ordered several specific bequests, then granted two-thirds of the remainder of the estimated $800 million estate to heirs, including Princess Yasmin, 10, his daughter by Second Wife Rita Hayworth. Among the specifics: $280,000 and his Chantilly, France, villa to elegant French Fashion Model Bettina, 35, his constant companion since 1955; $14,000 to Sybilla Szczeniowska, 38, a blonde New York fashion designer who met Aly 20 years ago in Cairo; and $56,000 to her Cairo-born son, Marek, 16, a Manhattan private school junior, who recollected &quo;seeing the prince three or four times in my life. When he was in New York, he used to come to see us, and he gave my brother and me $50 when he did. The prince wanted to be my godfather, but it was against his religion. But he was always a spiritual godfather to me."

In 1920, State Department Code Clerk James Thurber, then 25, defected into journalism, has harbored ever since an unrealized ambition: "One friend of mine put it very well when he said, 'That s.o.b. has been trying to get on the stage for 40 years.' " Last week when a star of his long-running Broadway revue, A Thurber Carnival, abruptly quit, the author-cartoonist trouped into the breach. With only two rehearsals, under Director Burgess Meredith ("Now I have him at my mercy; I can tell him that as an actor he has no right to change the author's words"), Thurber played himself with fluffless finesse in a twelve-minute sketch about a writer embroiled in a frustrating correspondence with his bureaucratic publisher. Since the role calls for him to be seated throughout, Thurber's blindness was no handicap, and Meredith felt that the part "lit an old fuse in him; he seems to have come up with some peculiar stage ability." Equally enthused, the New York Times critic labeled the actor "the perfect Thurber." Drinking it all in, the Great White Way's white-haired new hope announced that he would remain in the role for the rest of the Broadway run, might even go with the show on the road.

For the longest papal junket (more than 100 miles round trip) since Pius IX's horsecarriage tour of the Roman countryside in 1857, Pope John XXIII, 79, climbed into the armchair seat of his Chrysler, donated by U.S. Catholics, at 6:15 a.m. one morning last week. The purpose of the trip: a sentimental journey to the seminary at Roccantica where 56 years ago he said the second mass of his career. After admiring the olive-groved Sabine Hills through the plexiglas top of his speeding (frequently at more than 60 miles per hour) limousine, the Pope was greeted by townspeople and papal Secretary of State Domenico Cardinal Tardini, himself a former student at the seminary. Arriving at the chapel, His Holiness seemed disappointed at not finding the portrait of St. Francis he still remembered (it had been stored during World War II and never put back). Later, before presenting a gift to his alma mater and taking coffee and cakes with his hosts, the Pope addressed 85 awed seminarians on the school's tennis court, remarked. "Fifty years ago we were here, and now you are here. But as you can see, we are not too old."

Manhattan Visitor Harry S. Truman, 76, took time out to scorch some of this week's visitors to Manhattan with his patented hellfire. "I don't think any more of Nasser than I do of Khrushchev," he said, "and they can both go to the bottom of the Atlantic as far as I'm concerned." Truman added, his nose still to the brimstone, that "as soon as Castro started all that anti-U.S. propaganda, we should have given him a shave and a bath and a warning to behave himself."

Just as he was about to start his eighth season as advisory coach at Stockton (Calif.) College, Amos Alonzo Stagg changed his mind, sounded the final gun to a football era. "For the past 70 years," read his letter of resignation, "I have been coach; at 98 years of age, it seems a good time to stop."

In a London Daily Telegraph installment of his forthcoming memoirs, Lord Ismay, 73, World War II Chief of Staff to Defense Minister (and Prime Minister) Winston Churchill, recalled an agonizing mid-August afternoon in 1940. It was shortly before the height of the Blitz. Churchill and "Pug" Ismay, visiting Royal Air Force fighter-command headquarters, received word that every airworthy British craft was already in action aloft, and that still another wave of Luftwaffe attackers was roaring across the Channel. Yet by dusk, the R.A.F. had miraculously turned aside the Nazi onslaught, and the Prime Minister and his aide started to drive back to Chequers. "Don't speak to me," murmured Churchill. "I have never been so moved." Then after a long five minutes, the Prime Minister leaned forward and broke the silence: "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few." Ismay wrote: "The words burned into my brain, and I repeated them to my wife when I got home." Several days later, after Churchill had repeated the sentence in a memorable address to the House of Commons, Ismay realized that "Churchill too had evidently photographed them in his mind."

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