Home from a tour of the Philippines, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, 81, who had his differences with the last Democratic President, received an unexpected invitation to a White House luncheon with a bipartisan body of Government leaders. After President Kennedy praised MacArthur for his "triumphant" tour, the general thanked the President for making him "feel a part of the current scene." Later the vigorous vintage soldier offered his impressions of the onetime sailor in the White House: "He seems to have changed very little since he was one of my PT-boat commanders in the Pacific war. He was a good one, too--a brave and resourceful young naval officer. But, judging from the luncheon he served me today [piece de resistance: Cornish hen; dessert: omelette surprise]," added MacArthur, "he is living somewhat higher now."

While preparing for a concert series at Los Angeles' Pilgrimage Theater, aging (60) but unbowed Violin Virtuoso Jascha Heifetz commented bitingly to the press on his seeming lack of interest in modern compositions. "Yes, I play them occasionally," said he. "And for two reasons. First, to discourage the composers from writing any more, and secondly, to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven."

Breasting the tides of public life, British Labor Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell, 55, has been known to take his mind off political worries by acquiring an occasional painting. Last week a London gossip columnist delighted in detailing a recent Gaitskell purchase: a nude painting of attractive Lady Coldstream, 26, sometime model and fulltime wife of Fine Arts Professor Sir William Coldstream, 53. The painter, Anthony Man. labored to defend the conservative nature of Gaitskell's buy. "Mind you," said Man, "it's not a nudey nude of the 'Oh, I'm shivering because it's cold' type. It's a side view, really a very discreet affair."

The French cuisine of the New Frontier may have claimed a Republican victim. Shortly after Jacqueline Kennedy's Mount Vernon fete champetre (TIME, July 21), Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen, 65, a cornbred Illinoisan, checked into Bethesda Naval Hospital for treatment of a reactivated peptic ulcer that had been quiescent for many years.

In a will probated in Los Angeles, the late electronics trailblazer, Dr. Lee de Forest, bequeathed $1 apiece to his three daughters, and very little more for his only other heir, fourth (and last) wife Marie Mosquini. The "Father of Radio" --whose 1906 invention of the audion tube had also made possible long-distance telephony, talking movies and television --had burned out his fourth fortune and wound up with $1,250.

Last spring Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy caused a stir at Washington's blueblooded Metropolitan Club when he learned that a fellow member, George Cabot Lodge, 34 (son of Henry Cabot Lodge), had been prevented from inviting to lunch George Weaver, who is 1) young Lodge's successor as Assistant Secretary of Labor, and 2) a Negro. But last week, though notably reluctant to discuss the episode, the Metropolitan Club had admitted Lodge and Guest Weaver to its once segregated sanctum.

Though often blasted by his critics, left-leaning French Author Jean-Paul Sartre, 56, was never really bombed--until last week. Then supporters of the French ultras, obviously nettled by Sartre's stumping for Algerian independence, planted a bomb outside his fourth-floor walkup apartment on Paris' Left Bank. Sartre was judiciously vacationing at the time, and no one was hurt.

The man who made the nuclear submarine has some explosive reactions to the Navy. Said Vice Admiral Hyman George Rickover, 61, to the House Appropriations Committee last May (according to testimony released last week) : "The Navy would rather have aircraft carriers than any other type of ship, including the Polaris submarine. Most of the officers in authority in the Navy today are aviators or influenced by aviators." As for interservice bickering, Rickover had a neat solution: simply shoot down the Air Force and give its long-legged bombers to the Navy, its missiles to the Army. "By returning to two services," said Rickover, "you will be subjected to the same compelling arguments for appropriations from two instead of three groups." Concluded Admiral Rickover gratuitously: "The military is not so esoteric that no one but a man in uniform can understand it. I think even a Congressman is capable of understanding it."

"As I see myself," Actor Sidney Poitier, 34, reflected a while ago, "I'm an average Joe Blow Negro. But as the cats say in my area, I'm out there wailing for us all." Now, adhering to the script of his Broadway and Hollywood hit, A Raisin in the Sun, Miami-born Poitier has moved into a previously all-white exurban area of New York's Westchester County. Ensconced with his wife and four daughters in a newly purchased twelve-room Tudor house in Mount Pleasant, Poitier was enjoying a warm reception from virtually all of his neighbors.

Once again tearing Husband Tony from his matchstick-model making at Kensington Palace, Britain's Princess Margaret, 30, showed a sample of her glittering new maternity wardrobe at a Fortune Theater performance of a satirical revue called Beyond the Fringe, which sniped at everything from the Establishment to Shakespeare. Predictably, the princess gave every outward indication of savoring the pungent aroma of roasted sacred cow.

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