When Philadelphia Attorney Harold Stassen, 53, one of the most former of U.S. political bigwigs, wrote the Kennedy Administration last week urging U.N. membership for two Germanys and two Chinas, the United Press International dutifully dispatched the news to subscribing papers. In New York, the exhaustive ("All the News That's Fit to Print") Times ignored the item, and the tabloid Daily News put it on the obituary page.

Meeting in Beverly Hills, the American Guild of Creative Fashion Designers singled out the "Ten Worst-Dressed Actresses in Films." Among the victims of the group's needlework; Lucille Ball ("Nothing she wears makes sense, blends or complements''), Anna Magnani ("Gives the impression of someone playing Macbeth in tramp clothing"), Anita Ekberg ("A 39-in. bust wearing a size 12 dress"), Millie Perkins ("A very dear and sweet person but much too honest in her refusal to correct nature's mistakes"), Shelley Winters ("Her style sense is totally unrelated to anything living or dead") and Brigitte Bardot ("It is difficult to associate Mlle. Bardot with any type of clothing").

For generations in the Kentucky hill country his family had been farmers, moonshiners, preachers and feudists. His father was an impoverished and illiterate coal miner. But young, log cabin-born Jesse Stuart, who often went coon hunting with a lantern and a volume of Robert Burns, was determined to go to college (Said a neighbor: "He's a plum fool. If he was a young'un of mine, I'd whip his tail with a hickory"). Although hiring out to farmers for 25-c- a day at the age of nine, and working full time from ages 11 to 15, Stuart eventually--following circus and steel mill stints--graduated from Tennessee's Lincoln Memorial University. Five years later, while teaching high school back home, Stuart memorialized his mountain kinfolk with an ingenuous, affecting book of colloquial sonnets, Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow. "I was not mastering poetry," he decided. "It was mastering me." Last week, many novels, short stories and verse collections later, Jesse Stuart, now at 53 having left his Kentucky farm to teach for a year at the American University at Cairo, received the $5,000 award of the Academy of American Poets. Among his prestigious predecessors: E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Conrad Aiken.

With the order of the day--"Go limp if police attempt to move you"--Philosopher-Pacifist Bertrand Russell, 88, laboriously and lengthily prepared for his massive, passive, sit-down demonstration in favor of unilateral British nuclear disarmament. (The new creed: "I'd rather be Red than dead ") When the great day finally came last weekend, the Gandhiose effort was a bit of a flop. When his silent horde of 3,000 arrived outside the Ministry of Defense to squat on the cold pavement, the box formation of 400 bobbies perversely refused to touch a soul. When the Russell forces prepared to tack their anti-nuclear declarations to the Ministry door, the police talked them into using tape instead.

Visiting an old friend--Director John Huston--during the filming of The Misfits last summer, the green-eyed, blonde Manhattan matron was suddenly beckoned to by Star Clark Gable. "You," he ordered. Huston's visitor was promptly hired as an extra, made her movie debut in an opening-scene kiss with Gable. The role was just another chapter in the multi-chaptered life of Marietta Peabody Fitzgerald Tree, 43, a decorative, deserving Democrat who last week became the U.S. representative to the U.N. Human Rights Commission. To fellow Boston Brahmins, Marietta is the granddaughter of Groton School Founder Endicott Peabody, the daughter of Harvard Overseer and retired Episcopal Bishop Malcolm Peabody, the ex-wife of Attorney Desmond Fitzgerald. To Britons, she is now the wife of onetime Tory M.P. Ronald Tree, a multimillionaire investment banker in the land of his grandfather, the original Marshall Field. To New Yorkers, she is the tireless worker for interracial amity who was once a director of the National Urban League. To Democrats, she is a dedicated campaigner and state committeewoman whose tastefully opulent town house in 1952 became the salon of her party's intellectual shadow Cabinet and the saloon of the rank and file. Recalls one New York leader: "I shall never forget the sight of the Trees' English butler, Collins, dying by stately inches at the thought of what that mass of Democrats could do to the house, or of Ronnie Tree, stiff, perspiring, and apprehensive. And all the time Marietta was sashaying around as if it were a picnic in Central Park."

For some 40 years one of the most prosaic of political pundits, Columnist David Lawrence, 72, unaccountably burst into verse last week in his back-page editorial in U.S. News and World Report. Entitled "A World United?" and preaching peace through brotherhood, the seven-stanza work by Poet Lawrence concluded:

May nations learn there is no ban On testing Love's atomic bomb--

Thus Enmity destroy!

For peace is in the soul of man--

We need not wait for death to come

Its quiet to enjoy!

Strolling through his gardens near Pope Leo XIII's former summer residence (now the Vatican radio station), Pope John XXIII came upon the highest point in Vatican City, admired the vista and the ancient Tower of Porta Pertusa. "What a pity," he sighed, as he saw the ramshackle remains of the 60-foot tower. "This is such a lovely place." Within weeks, workmen began restoring the 500-year-old structure, which will be equipped with an elevator for what insiders said would become the Pontiff's summer retreat for meditation and for private audiences with relatives and intimates.

At a $100-a-plate Lincoln Day dinner at the Waldorf, New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller lived up to his reputation as the Republican Party's most dedicated back patter: enjoying himself hugely. Rocky slapped a slew of G.O.P. shoulder blades, even slung an affectionate arm around a handsome new bust of himself (by Italian Sculptor Gualberto Rocchi).

Last year, as Iowa's incumbent Democratic Governor, U.S. Senate candidate and favorite-son choice for President, Herschel Loveless was avidly courted by White House Aspirant Jack Kennedy, had every reason to hope he would be Kennedy's selection as vice-presidential running mate. But Country Boy Loveless was disappointed by the Yankee trader. Passed up for Vice President, Loveless was defeated for the Senate and overlooked for Secretary of Agriculture. In January, Kennedy finally named him to a $20,000 post on the Federal Renegotiation Board. And as of last week it seemed that Loveless might even have trouble moving into that place: the Eisenhower Administration appointee he was supposed to succeed was not required to resign and had no intentions of doing so.

After eight years of serving his private eyewash to magazines, Hard Guy Mickey Spillane, 42, plans to come out with another book this spring. In the period since Spillane's Mike Hammer last gunned down the pike, Mickey has been a proselyting pacifist for Jehovah's Witnesses, has taken stock of his literary competition. "All of my early stuff," he says, "is now looked upon as mild. I was the first in the field, but now they've even got women writers who purvey more violence and tough talk than I ever did." Critic Spillane, whose seven books have sold more than 30 million copies, is equally unimpressed by Nobel Prizewinner William Faulkner: "He doesn't write for the people. And why does he go in for all that morbid stuff?"

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