Winging off to Paris in a cloud of dustups, TV's Jack Paar still could not understand why the folks back home took so dim a view of his Berlin border antics.

"Contrary to that of my own country," he sulked, "the West German press was bowled over by the reporting I've done on the Berlin situation." Sample rave, from Berlin's B.Z.: "Go back to the U.S., Mr. Jack Paar. We don't want to see you here any more."

To mend a fence allegedly destroyed by the Redcoats in 1778, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd forwarded a check for $18 to the rector of Philadelphia's St. Peter's Episcopal Church. In response to the Rev. Joseph Koci Jr.'s tongue-in-cheek demand for some $760,000 in damages and compound interest, Lloyd legalistically pointed out that since Revolutionary War treaty conventions exempted Britain from further financial responsibility toward her unruly erstwhile American colonies, the St. Pe ter's claim should properly be addressed to "the federal government of the United States or the state government of Pennsylvania, as you feel appropriate." But from his personal treasury World War II Brigadier Lloyd coughed up the original value of the fence--largely, he explained, because the presumed ravager of St. Peter's had been, like himself, of Welsh descent and a Royal Artillery officer.

Maria Beale Fletcher, 19, stage-struck daughter of a pair of professional dancers from Asheville, N.C.. found herself Miss America of 1962. A sleek (35-24-35) veteran of the Rockette line at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall, the hazel-eyed brunette so impressed bumptious Contest Judge (and Broadway Producer) David Merrick that before the Atlantic City finals, he planned to offer her the understudy lead in a forthcoming musical. Among the new Miss America's projected rounds: an overseas tour to display "an example of what our youth is like other than the juvenile delinquents."

When she married a Columbia medical school pediatrics professor in 1932. Millicent Carey Mclrrrosh considered resigning as headmistress of Manhattan's top-notch Brearley School, changed her mind after her aunt, Bryn Mawr's late President M. Carey Thomas, coldly reminded her: "You can have your babies in August." Last week, after five babies, 17 years at Brearley and 14 more as head of New York's Barnard College, Educator Mclntosh, 62, announced that she would finally retire come next commencement. Future plans: to squander a year on "a real holiday," then move off to rural Massachusetts with Husband Rustin Mclntosh and continue her literary crusade against the tendency of educated women to "settle down into domesticity and never raise a peep."

Tracked down in Venice by frantic transatlantic phone calls, holidaying Soprano Anna Moffo, 26, jetted home posthaste to take over from ailing Australian Joan Sutherland in the San Francisco Opera's opening-night performance of Lucia di Lammermoor. Delighted by her rapid rise in what she describes as "dog eat dog" divasville, the handsome, Pennsylvania-born singer was less than delighted with the fast flight, exhaustedly proclaimed: "I'm violently against the jet-and-taxi age; the prima donna of 50 years ago had it much better with the slow boat and the horse and buggy."

For one of the U.S. Senators in the movie adaptation of Advise and Consent, Otto Preminger tapped a film freshman whom the state of Arizona cast in the same role from 1912 to 1941: Democrat Henry Fountain Ashurst, 87. No one, however, could fairly accuse Preminger of typecasting. "Five-Syllable Henry" Ashurst, now living in retirement in Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel, is admittedly the very model of an oldtime, wing-collared Senator. But in the Preminger movie, he will play a reticent, somnolent solon from Arkansas--a formidable frustration to a man who once described himself as a "veritable peripatetic bifurcated volcano of language."

On what his palace staff unromantically described as a "routine prefectural tour," Japan's Emperor Hirohito took Empress Nagako back to volcano-surrounded Lake Inawashiro, where the pair spent their August 1924 honeymoon. Reveling in well-remembered sights, the Emperor solicitously helped his wife over craggy spots, won an affectionate smile by graciously passing on to her a bouquet of alpine flowers presented to him by a local botanist. Carried away by such uxorious behavior on the part of the man who once was a god, the chief Imperial chamberlain sighed sentimentally: "Just a sweet, middle-aged couple."

Out of patience with the U.S.--"The only America I like is the America of Whitman, Thoreau and Emerson, and that never really existed"--scatological Novelist Henry (Tropic of Cancer) Miller, 69, slipped into London making noises about chucking it all. "If I had my time over again," he confided, "I wouldn't be a writer or an artist or anything like that. I'd be a shoemaker, a fisherman or something humble. Nowadays our work has no relation to our lives. It's stulti fying. All work is degrading, demoralizing and crushing to the individual."

Unfazed by an unprecedented fuel-pressure failure at launch, top Test Pilot Joe Walker hot-rocketed his stub-winged X-15 to a record-setting 3,645 m.p.h. When he finally set down at Rogers Dry Lake, Calif., the indomitable father of four (the latest born fortnight ago) opined that one of the plane's bugs, originally diagnosed as heat condensation, was actually only the "scorching of paint inside the canopy." Skin temperature of the X-15 at the height of Walker's "by guess and by gosh" flight: a toasty 850DEG.

Lumbago-lamed at his Texas ranch, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, 79, reported that he was still "hurting some" but expected to be "jumping around soon." Sure enough, two days later, when grilled about rumors that he might resign the speakership--a post he has held twice as long as any predecessor--Mister Sam started jumping, gaveled down the motion with one word: "Idiocy."

Relaxing in shorts and bare feet, Israel's prickly Premier David Ben-Gurion, 74, celebrated the eve of the 5,722nd (since the Creation) Jewish New Year by peering into his crystal ball for a Tel Aviv tabloid. "I am no prophet," cautioned Ben-Gurion as he hunched knees to chin, yoga style, to prophesy, "but if what we call the cold war is ended--and I hope it will be without the world exploding--in 20 years America will be a welfare state and Russia will be a democratic country."

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