In a sharp about-face, retired Air Force General Nathan F. Twining, who had logged 44 years of active service when he resigned the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last September, took a post with one of the U.S.'s largest book publishing houses. He will be vice chairman of the board of directors of Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc. But retiring Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, who has had mountains of surplus corn on his mind through his eight hectic years in office, elected to linger in familiar pastures. Last week he became a director of Corn Products Co., world's largest processor of that troublesome crop.

After signing a property settlement (terms undisclosed) with Playwright Arthur Miller in Manhattan, Cinemorsel Marilyn Monroe flitted off to Ciudad Juarez for a south-of-the-border, quickie coup de grace to their improbable four-year marriage. Marilyn sounded little upset by her sudden move. "I would love to have a plate of tacos and enchiladas" she said.

In a pair of clamorous skirmishes on the artistic front, the aging daughters of two famous men fought to keep things as Papa would have liked them. In Manhattan, Helen Clay Frick, 70, for 41 years a trustee of the great art collection amassed by Steel Tycoon Henry Clay Frick, quit in protest when other trustees overrode her objections to accept three art objects left to the collection by the late John D. Rockefeller Jr. Insisting that her father never intended to have his collection supplemented by gifts from others, Miss Frick also snorted that the Rockefeller bequests--a Piero della Francesca painting and two marble busts--were either inferior art to start with or damaged. Down in Washington, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 76, was no less outraged when she heard of a scheme to designate part of a projected Washington cultural center as a memorial to rough-riding Theodore Roosevelt. Mrs. Longworth blasted the plan in tones that sounded like an echo of T.R. himself. Said she: "The hell with the cultural center as a memorial. I flee from thinking about things like that. It has nothing to do with a memorial to my father."

After a long Christmas vacation at her Sandringham country home, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II returned to London accompanied by Prince Philip and their three royal moppets, notably including husky young Prince Andrew, eleven months. The holidays over, Elizabeth and Philip set off on a historic tour of Britain's former Indian empire. First stopover was in Cyprus, where no British monarch has set foot since Richard the LionHearted (in 1191). Over an orange squash, the Queen chatted cordially with bush-bearded President Archbishop Makarios, so recently a mastermind of the Cypriot revolt against the Crown. Flying on to New Delhi, Elizabeth was greeted thunderously by some 1,000,000 Indians who caught their first glimpse of a British ruler since Elizabeth's grandfather, George V, came to India in 1911 soon after his coronation. Somewhat unnecessarily, Prime Minister Nehru called on his nation to welcome Elizabeth warmly--but allowed that should she decide to go tiger hunting, "I am not going with her."

Eight years after Navy brass tried to push him into premature retirement, Vice Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, father of the atomic submarine, was summoned to the deck of the Nautilus, his first nuclear offspring, to receive the Distinguished Service Medal, highest peacetime award in the Navy's gift. In the six years since Nautilus was commissioned, Rickover's atomic family has grown fast: last week's medal-pinning ceremony was coupled with the keel laying of the Lafayette, 34th ship in the nation's awesomely lethal nuclear underseas fleet.

For Britons wheezing and snuffling through the midwinter vapors, Conductor Sir John Barbirolli, who plans to commute transatlantically between the Houston Symphony and the Halle Orchestra of Manchester, prescribed his podium-tested cold cure: "Put on two pullovers. Stand on a chair. Turn the wireless onto a symphony concert and conduct like mad with a poker or pencil for an hour or so. The cold, I guarantee, will have vanished by the last movement." A comparative youngster in a profession noted for longevity, Sir John, 61, who is inclined to share his wisdom with everybody, freely explained the secret of his nostrum: "Do you know why conductors live so long? Because we perspire so much."

In Rome for the elevation to cardinal of St. Louis' Archbishop Joseph Ritter was hot-fingered Vibraharpist Lionel Hampton, a friend of the new cardinal since 1948. Musician Hampton, who kissed Cardinal Ritter's ring just after the formal papal announcement of his appointment, had made a special trip with a group of Catholics from Indianapolis, Ritter's former diocese. A onetime Catho lic altar boy who now belongs to no church but considers himself "a good-will ambassador of God," Hampton explained: "Cardinal Ritter's work for integration and in the educational field has given our courts real incentive to help the cause of integration. Before, I thought the world was going into darkness, but he's given me real hope."

At a ball for the benefit of Polish refugees, Princess Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia, better known as Cosmetics Queen Helena Rubinstein, was joined by her old friend and near neighbor on Manhattan's Park Avenue, Pianist Artur Rubinstein. After the ball was over, Helena, ageless but eightyish, commented on her distant cousin: "I told his wife, 'The older he gets, the better he gets.' " What did she and Rubinstein, 72 this week, talk about? "A lot of nonsense."

More or less automatically disemployed by his marriage to Britain's Princess Margaret, ex-Photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones has been in a rare quandary ever since: as the husband of a princess, it was beneath his dignity to take any old job, but as a commoner, it was beneath his self-respect to do nothing for a living. The dilemma was happily resolved last week when the artistically inclined Tony was named a "Grade 1 officer" to advise on visual displays staged by Britain's government-sponsored Council of Industrial Design. Tony's esthetic duties will carry no salary, but whenever he leaves London on council business he will be entitled to draw $6 a day in overnight expenses. If he never goes out of town, however, he will be money out of pocket, because all council staffers are expected to chip in 35-c- a month to defray the cost of a tea wagon that rolls through their offices mornings and afternoons.

Taking puckish note of a recent change of residence, the current Harvard Alumni Bulletin ran a short announcement about one "John F. Kennedy, LL.D. '56" under its 1940 class notes: "On Jan. 20 he will move his family to a house in Washington occupied for many years by the late Franklin D. Roosevelt '04, LL.D. '29."

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