Emerging from a three-day "rest and a general checkup" in a private psychiatric hospital in Manhattan, Vagabond Crooner Eddie Fisher protested at a high-pitched press conference that the only romance between Wife Elizabeth Taylor and her Cleopatra costar, Richard Burton, was onscreen. Laughing off rumors of breakup and breakdown as "preposterous, ridiculous and absolutely false," Fisher predicted a similar public disclaimer from Liz, but after a 15-minute transatlantic call, returned to the conference with a stricken look. "You know," he warbled in the most pitiable understatement of the week, "you can ask a woman to do something, and she doesn't always do it." Hours later came a statement of a sort from the cinema sorceress--a wordless but ostentatiously public pub crawl through Rome with Burton during which they drove, danced and nuzzled till dawn.

Lining up with the Minow school of TV criticism, Hugh Carleton Greene, 51, kid brother of Novelist Graham Greene and director-general of the quality-conscious British Broadcasting Corp..

bluntly lectured a Washington conclave of U.S. broadcasters on the consequences of exporting nothing but "the ideals of Tombstone and Deadman's Gulch." Said Greene: "History has known few nobler or more selfless actions than the generosity which America has shown to other nations during the last 20 years.

But one cannot help wondering whether the good that has been done by program after program of foreign aid is not in danger of being undone by the image of America as it appears in program after program on the television screens of the world." "Just like This Is Your Life," cracked Britain's Herbert Morrison, now Baron Morrison of Lambeth, 74, but the longtime Laborite warhorse was himself sniffling into his handkerchief, and much of his audience--which had just honored him with a vellum book of tribute--was weeping openly. Occasion: the retirement of "our 'Erb" from the treasureship of London's Labor Party organization, which he had served almost from its founding 48 years before. Stepping down partly to give someone else a turn and partly because his wife was wanting "more of him at home," the chipper former chief deputy to Clement Attlee was not without one final exhortation. "Love London." began the bobby's son who so fervently has. "Be meticulously upright, bold, sensible and socialist. Remember, we exist not to be masters of London nor even of our country. We exist to serve." Harvard University's newest chair--the .Winthrop Professorship of History, commemorating the family that produced the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony--went to a second-generation American who made his formidable reputation chronicling somewhat later waves of immigration. Harvard's first Winthrop historian: Pulitzer Prizewinner Oscar (The Uprooted) Handlin, 46, a Brooklyn grocer's son.

Flocking to Australia's first major auction of the works of Portraitist (and TIME Cover Artist) William Dobell, eager Sydney art lovers anted up $116,730 for 36 paintings that Dobell himself had originally peddled for a total of $1,300. Conceding that "two--or maybe five--of them are pictures of which I am not ashamed," Dobell was nonetheless astounded at his new rating in the art market. His first reaction: "People must have more money than sense." As abruptly as he had jettisoned them three years ago, Monaco's absolutist Prince Rainier III, 38, restored to his subjects their 51-year-old constitution and frump Parliament. The de-putsch decree --designed to juice up Rainier's popular support and democratic image--was proclaimed on the eve of a showdown with Monaco's protecting power, France, over the principality's tax-free status. Though negotiations would commence below the summit, His Most Serene Highness, backed up by his fully mobilized 70-man palace guard, was pressing for a "man-to-man" confrontation with President Charles de Gaulle. Burdened with such cares, the divinely appointed sovereign was for the first time looking forward to Princess Grace's Hollywood comeback. "I have never seen America in the summer," Rainier announced, "and I mean to play a lot of golf. That's the best spot for forgetting about state problems."

To the clamorous dismay of a musical world that has hailed her as La Stupenda, Coloratura Joan Sutherland, 35, announced that she would have to suspend her operatic career for up to six months because of a two-year-old spinal disk ailment. Though she stoically plans to complete her current Covent Garden contract and the spring season at La Scala in a steel-ribbed corset, the strapping, handsome Australian will have to abandon a scheduled summer tour of her native land to undergo medical treatment in her Swiss villa. "Only when that is finished," said she, "can I make any decision about my future engagements. But I certainly have no intention of announcing my retirement."

Running interference for New York's usually self-sufficient Robert Moses, Francis Cardinal Spellman raised in a private audience with Pope John XXIII the matter of the Vatican Pavilion exhibit at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Result: the pavilion's attractions will include Michelangelo's only signed work, the moving Pieta, which has long graced the first chapel of St. Peter's Basilica and has never before in its 463-year history been out of the Vatican.

Enjoined by Wife Bess not to "show off like you usually do," Harry Truman, 77, was flawlessly decorous as he bestowed the Yale Club of Washington's annual "distinguished achievement" award on his last Secretary of State, Dean Acheson ('15). Responding to Truman's description of him as "one of the greatest of the great Secretaries of State,'' Acheson hailed his "beloved chief" as "a Yale man in every sense of the word,'' reminisced admiringly that "in the Truman Administration you often got shot in the front but never in the back." Summed up Acheson midway in the mellow proceedings: "Life bubbles out of this man like the spring of eternal youth. He is charged as White Rock never was."

Though at times he blew foul or fraudulent, television will be forever indebted to Jack Paar for desperately needed williwaws of spontaneity. Observed Bobby

JACK PAAR Good to the lost mongoose.

Kennedy during Paar's farewell last week to nearly five years of five-nights-a-week stands: "1 think all of us have a great obligation to him." Similar tributes came from such other previous $320-a-shot guests as Dick Nixon, Jack Benny and Billy Graham. But as ever, teary-eyed Tragicomedian Paar prevailed, reveling in his last self-apologia (about Castro. "I was wrong in many areas") and final vestigial vendetta (was Dorothy Kilgallen headed for India "to fight a mongoose"?).

And already Paar had set a terminal date on his long-sought licking of wounds (many self-inflicted) at his Westchester, N.Y., retreat. Come next fall, he was committed to gratify again his fans' insatiable appetite for his headhunting, head-shrinking seances on a once-a-week show.

Having decided that she had not "done anything for ten years (I tried to learn to play bridge, but I just couldn't stand it)," Clarice ("Cookie") Knowland, 59 --third wife of Oakland Tribune Publisher Joseph R. Knowland, 88, and stepmother of its current editor, ex-Senate Republican Leader William F. Knowland --upped and registered for Journalism 4500 (Editing) at Alameda State College night school. To a standard questionnaire demanding whether she was interested in a career in journalism, the zippy ex-schoolmarm responded with already professional economy: "In a family way."

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