An alumna of the Juilliard School of Music and the Ziegfeld Follies, Soprano Jane Pickens married millionaire Manhattan Investment Banker William C. Langley in 1954, gave up her TV show to juggle benefit balls and paint. Working in her Park Avenue apartment and at her Westbury, L.I., country home, she developed what one art authority called "an innocent eye." Wondered she: "Is that good or bad?" Last week, good or bad, the ex-songstress had her first one-woman show (with proceeds to cerebral-palsy research), sold 34 canvases on opening day to such prominent gallerygoers as Mrs. Laurance Rockefeller. Adele Astaire Douglass, Elizabeth Arden Graham, Mrs. George Baker, Mrs. Winthrop Aldrich and Mrs. Thomas Hitchcock.

Because he left $5,600 of his estimated $15 million estate to London's Southwark Cathedral, Oscar Hammerstein II will be honored by the designation of two choirboys as "Hammerstein Chanters," and by a plaque "To the glory of God and in memory of Oscar Hammerstein, citizen of the United States of America, playwright and lyricist." Among the other assorted literary types honored in the ancient church: William Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, John Harvard.

Show business's "star-spangled octopus," the Music Corp. of America, was up in alms. After the talent agency's top brass decided to honor Board Chairman Jules Caesar Stem's 65th birthday with a donation to his favorite charity --Research to Prevent Blindness, Inc.-ex-Ophthalmologist Stein promised to "match anything raised up to a million." Last week 19 of his openhanded executives ponied up an even million and forced him to fill out the $2,000,000 parlay. Said part-time Philanthropist Stein: "I guess they've done pretty well here, after all."

"I was just spending a quiet evening reading Horace. I don't quite understand what all this raucous noise is," Harvard President Nathan Pusey told 1,500 students storming the locked gates* of his Harvard Yard home. Exercised by the university's sudden decision--after 325 years--to inscribe Harvard College diplomas in English instead of Latin, the Cambridge classicists were undeterred by Pusey's non-Horatian plea:

What's pat in the Latin

Or chic in the Greek,

I always distinguish

More clearly in English.

While a toga-clad rabble-rouser egged them on, their legions grew to 4,000 in two riotous evenings (against a force of 32 Yard cops and proctors, augmented during the second demonstration by 25 tear-gas-tossing Cambridge police). Marching on Harvard Square and making the spring night hideous with an ad hominem battle cry--"Latin, Si; Pusey, No!" --the undergraduates got nowhere with a recalcitrant president, who (said the Crimson) would forevermore be "derided as the man who changed alma mater to foster mother."

A new U.S. lactation record for goats was announced, and the standard-shatterer was no ordinary goatnik but a good old Flat Rock (N.C.) nanny. Her breeder: a University of Chicago Phi Bete ('04) now specializing in capralogy, Lillian Steichen Sandburg, 78, sister of Photographer Edward Steichen and wife (since 1908) of Poet-Lincoln Lord Carl Sandburg. The record: 191 Ibs. of butterfat, 5,750 Ibs. of milk in a 305-day period.

Awaiting the birth of her first child, Actress Joan Plowright, 31, bowed out of her Tony-winning role as the unwed mother in A Taste of Honey, will return to her native England as soon as her new husband. Sir Laurence Olivier, 53, finishes his run in Becket. More blase about the impending arrival of her fourth child, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, 36. saw no reason to slow down her social pace, sailed off for the Cannes Film Festival and the London premiere of Cinemactor Husband Peter's Exodus. Quipped the 37-year-old father-to-be, after figuring out that Pat is carrying John F. Kennedy's 17th niece or nephew: "Right in the family, Jack can have his own Peace Corps."

Ill lay: a couple of old cronies--Gary Cooper, 59, and Ernest Hemingway, 61 --who missed their second hunting date this year because of failing health. After Coop, increasingly weakened by cancer, canceled the safari, Papa had to postpone a visit to his friend's sickbed because of a recurrence of hypertension. Hemingway checked into Minnesota's Mayo Clinic, where he was treated for 53 days last winter. Cooper stayed in his Hollywood home. "In the past week," reported his doctor, "there has been a worsening of his general condition, and there is reason for grave concern."

"If you were President for a day, what would you do for the arts?" Thus bugged at a Women's National Democratic Club luncheon in Washington, Architect Philip Johnson denied that he would level the capital--just the major buildings, except for the White House and his own designs; Actress Cornelia Otis Skinner announced that she "would make it a capital punishment for any woman to keep her hat on during a performance"; Painter Larry Rivers begged the question, suggested that government control of the arts was comparable to "a gorilla threading a needle. It is at first cute, then clumsy, and most of all impossible."

Out of competition since her America's Cup victory over Britain's Sceptre in 1958, the $300,000, 69-ft. sloop Columbia will go back to the 12-meter races this summer under new management. At the helm: Cornelius ("Glit") Shields Jr., 27, two-time International class champion of Long Island Sound, nephew of Columbia's new owner, Investment Banker Paul Shields, and son of famed Yachtsman Cornelius ("Corny") Shields Sr., who has probably won more races than any other skipper in sailing history.

Billionaire Oilman H. L Hunt, 72, addressed a service station operators' convention in Houston, reaffirmed his loyalty to Calvin Coolidge. Asserting that Silent Cal was the last Chief Executive he could conscientiously support, the usually publicity-shy Hunt brooded aloud: "The country is so far gone that I am willing to say anything to dispel its apathy." Then the fat cat of the far right offered a real rouser: It's just as well that the Cuban invasion failed, because it was "just one Communist government trying to overthrow another."

With the traditional open-mindlessness of Hollywood, Gossip Columnist Louella Parsons reported last week: "I haven't seen La Dolce Vita, so I won't blast it as being amoral, immoral and depraved until I see it."

* Reminiscent of an old story remembered around Cambridge about an indignant proper Bostonian who complained that Harvard students were rowdies and urged President (1909-33) Abbott Lawrence Lowell to lock the Yard gates. Lowell's polite reply: "Should I lock the students in or out?"

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