Tooting into Paris after a two-month jam session in Africa as good-will ambassador for Pepsi-Cola and the State Department, leather-lunged Trumpeter Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong confided to the New York Herald Tribune's Art Buchwald that the Congo--for Satchmo, anyway--is as safe as a cat's own front porch. "Half the times I didn't know whether I was in the Congo or out of it," graveled Armstrong. "Them African places all look alike. But Leopoldville was great. I had three armies escorting me everywhere I went. There was the United Nations cats, the Congo cats, and then we had Ghanaian troops all around us. A man gets good protection in the Congo." But Satchmo's best life insurance was his refusal to talk politics: "I just took a John L. Sullivan stance and blew the horn!"

Devoted to an art that his dictator father proscribed as decadent, Jazz Pianist Romano Mussolini, 33, has long kept his political opinions to himself. Last week, temporarily diverting his attention from the combo he fronts in a new Rome nightclub, Romano finally admitted his belief that in most respects Papa knew best. Said he: "I would be a Fascist now or at any time in the past. Though I was brought up in a particular environment, I'm a Fascist in logic and conviction as well as in sentiment." He thinks that Italians were lots jollier under the Duce than they are under democracy: "Even with two or three cars, Italians are dissatisfied today. Morale is low. In the past they had nothing, but they were happier."

Accompanied by bright-eyed Princess Yasmin, 10, her pixyish daughter by the late Aly Khan, Cinemactress Rita Hayworth, 42, sailed from Manhattan for Spain to co-star with Rex Harrison in a film titled The Oldest Confession. On hand to chaperone Rita and Rex, who will be playing a married couple in the "suspense comedy," will be the film's producer, James Hill, who happens to be Rita's fifth and current husband.

In a belated victory dance, Illinois' twinkle-toed Governor-elect Otto Kerner, 52, kicked up his heels as if he had just heard the election returns. Democrat Kerner's elfin partners were two kiddies attending a Christmas party of Chicago's Off-the-Street Club, a civic organization that keeps children out of trouble and politicians out of smoke-filled rooms.

Eleanor Roosevelt came away from the Broadway hit version of Advise and Consent filled with "depression and disgust," she reported in her syndicated column. "I know how ruthless and how utterly discouraging politics can be. I think I know how to remember one's friends and how to fight against one's enemies. But I have seen this done without stealing, without doublecrossing and without threats." Particularly worried by the impression the show might make on Manhattan-based U.N. delegates, the one-time First Lady angrily declared: "If this were wartime, I think one would cry treason at this play."

Last winter Sweden's beautiful, bouncy Princess Birgitta went to West Germany to improve her German and indulge her zest for sports. While in Munich, Birgitta, 23, who teaches gymnastics, met a young man ideally equipped to help her with both projects. A skilled gymnast himself, Germany's rugged Prince Johann Georg of Hohenzollern, 28, is mad for sports, will soon get his doctor's degree from the University of Munich in the fresh-air field of archaeology -- which is also the lifelong hobby of Birgitta's grandfather, Sweden's King Gustaf. Later, invited to Sweden for a royal elk hunt, the Prince succeeded in bagging more attractive quarry. In Stockholm, Birgitta's widowed mother, Princess Sibylla, announced the royal engagement last week. Johann Georg may want to brush up on his fencing; only four days before the betrothal, Birgitta won a Swedish national fencing crown.

While Cinemactor Peter Lawford pushed ahead with a talent-packed extravaganza aimed at paying off the $2,000,000 deficit of the recent Democratic campaign (TIME, Dec. 19), Peter's mother melodramatically moved to meet her own bills. In Hollywood, Lady Lawford, seventyish, a British subject ("I would have voted for Mr. Nixon"), took a salesgirl's position with a flossy local jeweler. She was to draw $50 a week for expenses, plus 5% on her sales. Her ladyship's friends explained that she is getting along on a $52-a-month British pension, with Lawford helping out by paying the rent on her house and anteing up a $150 monthly allowance. Peter's friends had another explanation. Snapped one: "Peter has always taken care of his mother. She's bugged at him because she's not accepted in the social swim. She's trying to create the picture of a poor old lady living in a Montana lean-to on bacon grease." At week's end, after only two days on the job, Lady Lawford, who had earned not a penny in commissions, quit. Refusing her $50 pay, her ladyship blamed it all on a political conspiracy. She lamented that her jeweler boss claimed that he was losing his Democratic customers because of her differences with Peter's Kennedy-in-laws.

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