Asocial Satirist Mort Sahl, a disciple of Birth-Control Advocate Sir Julian Huxley ("He's a swinger; every time I read him, I say, 'You're right, you're right' "), had a population problem of his own. Whacked with a paternity suit by Costume Designer Patricia Manley, who in July bore a son she named Adam Matthew Sahl, the 34-year-old comedian equably announced, "I'm not admitting or denying anything. Let the court decide." Responded Miss Manley, reminiscing about the European tour she says she made with Sahl last fall: "Then I got pregnant. Mort doesn't feel those are the right circumstances for marriage."

From a world-worn valise stashed with his Manhattan publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, came the last will and testament of Novelist Ernest Hemingway. Handwritten by Hemingway at his Cuban ranch six years ago, the onionskin document left his entire unevaluated estate (including the manuscripts of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls which will probably wind up at Harvard) to his fourth wife. "I repose complete confidence in my beloved wife Mary," it continued, "to provide for [my three children by previous marriages] according to written instructions I have given her." Literary style of the testament: a stilted legalese ("I hereby cancel, annul and revoke . . ."), presumably cribbed from previous wills and marred by the misspelling, "siezed."

After a six-year eclipse, Flygirl Jacqueline Cochran, fiftyish, reclaimed the title of the world's fastest female. Piloting a T-38 twin-jet trainer at 842.6 m.p.h. over a speedway at California's Edwards Air Force Base, the high-level cosmetician (Jacqueline Cochran, Inc.) surpassed the 1955 record of France's Jacqueline Auriol by 127 m.p.h.

Life for Shane O'Neill, 42, only surviving son of Eugene O'Neill, has been a long day's journey into penury by way of prisons and public hospitals (for dope addiction). Disinherited by the father who had long ignored him, and unemployed since his collaboration on the 1959 bestseller, The Curse of the Misbegotten: A Tale of the House of O'Neill, the famed playwright's son was arraigned last week on his saddest charge yet: neglect of his four children. After finding not a single bed in the ramshackle Point Pleasant, N.J., home where his offspring slept on inflated swimming mats, police jailed O'Neill in lieu of $1,000 bail.

New York's Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, 53, donned an outsized fez to preside over Yankee Stadium festivities of the 62nd annual Negro Elks' convention. Next day, at Manhattan's Hotel Commodore, the Governor passed the fez--to his eldest son, Rodman, 28, who strode to the Grand Ballroom dais and invoked 2,000 delegates of the Improved Benevolent Protective Order with the salutation, "Brothers and daughters . . ."

Land-rich Heiress Lady Bird Johnson, 48, who was already buying radio stations when her Vice President husband was just another new boy in Congress, was still feathering the L.B.J. nest. Having picked up KRGV-AM-TV in Weslaco, Texas, for a $245,000 song a few years back, she managed to unload it for a rhapsodic $1,400,000.

Off for a fortnight's fling at Monte Carlo, Sir Winston Churchill, 86, forged his way across London Airport toward a waiting jet in a cloud of cigar smoke almost as blue as the funk which his defiance of myriad NO SMOKING signs induced in airport officials. Blithely puffing his way past a fuel-overflow pipe, Britain's wartime Prime Minister waited until he had reached the top of the ramp before chucking his stogie onto the tarmac in a shower of sparks. As a photographer frantically squashed the smoldering remains, a veteran airport bobby sighed, "It was a bit worse than usual this time," added hopelessly: "We are always concerned about Sir Winston's cigar, but who would dare tell him?"

After two years devoted to chamber works and some nonmusical timpani beating for the Soviet Union (his extracurricular title: Chairman of the Society for Friendship with Latin America), Russian Composer Aram Khachaturian, 58, was engaged in a return to the old Sabre Dance-rattling. Khachaturian, Moscow announced, has already completed Ballad of the Homeland ("in the nature of an anthem"), is currently immersed in a "rhapsody for violin and orchestra." Also on Khachaturian's project list as he works in his apartment in Moscow's ten-story House of Soviet Composers: a new opus indicative of the improved political pitch he developed after his 1948 censure for "bourgeois tendencies." His real masterwork, pledged the composer of Poem on Stalin (a companion piece to his wife's Cantata for Molotov), will commemorate the Soviet astronauts.

From his watering place in Quogue, L.I., Novelist John (Appointment in Samarra, Pal Joey) O'Hara, 56, worriedly suggested to readers of the New York Herald Tribune that Americans "worry so much about so many unimportant matters that we have no time to think about our danger." Wrote O'Hara: "Oh, I will not say that what Balenciaga does is unimportant, or that it is not unfortunate that Kelso is a gelding. Lung cancer is to be worried about and the railroads need help. Peanut butter. Air raid shelter. Coca-Cola. Arthur Miller. Arlene Francis. Francis Spellman . . . Freedom Riders. Mr. Clean. Denigration. Integration. Fluoridation. Filter tips." But meantime, asked O'Hara rhetorically, what are the Russians worrying about? Answer: "Us."

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