The dress featured in the current issue of Mody (meaning "fashions"), a Soviet monthly, was a Moscow original: billowy, not willowy. But the face in the sketch was fetchingly familiar. It ought to be. With arching eyebrows, sweeping lashes and bouffant hairdo, it could have been inspired only by Jacqueline Kennedy.

The Vatican will make no doctrinal concessions when it holds its Ecumenical Council next October, German-born Augustin Cardinal Bea, 81, president of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, told foreign newsmen at a Rome luncheon.

But to move closer to Rome's ultimate goal--"a union of all the baptized, all Christians, about 900 million of them"--the council will explore areas of practical cooperation between "the separated brethren" and the Roman Catholic Church. One area suggested by the cardinal was as timely as the afternoon headlines. "Imagine what it would mean to humanity," said the longtime confessor to Pope Pius XII, "if all Christians would march ahead completely united on the question of nuclear arms, disarmament and peace."

All gussied up in a blonde wig, an imitation tigerskin cape and a patterned gown that made the New York Botanical Garden seem like the Mojave Desert, Elsa Maxwell, 78, put on the biggest fountain scene since Zelda Fitzgerald wowed them in the '20s with her midnight dips in the pool outside Manhattan's Hotel Plaza. Planted before a fountain set up in the Plaza's ballroom for the Renaissance Ball, a society smash for the benefit of Italian orphans and students, Party-Giver Maxwell did an improbable impersonation of Anita Ekberg's sexy splashings in La Dolce Vita, wound up by tossing the toy cat she was holding to the audience. "Even at my age," said she, "I am perfectly willing to make a fool of myself." Dark days were upon the royal equestrians. At the Ascot riding show, Princess Anne, 11, trying a bit too hard to please the judge, Queen Elizabeth, lost out on the prizes by faulting four times--once for riding so high in her stirrups on a hurdle that she came close to a spill. At Windsor, Prince Charles, 13, nearly went jodhpurs-over-helmet when he ventured a tricky cross-shot under his pony's head during a polo lesson. It was left to hard-riding Prince Philip to preserve the family's honor. He knocked in two goals one day, four the next as his Foot Guards polo team galloped to a 4-to-3 victory over New Farm and a 6-to- 1/2 win over Swallet House.

To a Youth Physical Fitness conference in Washington, Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall, 42, recent conqueror (along with some 500,000 others last year) of Japan's Mount Fuji, professed himself shocked at America's scandalous flab surplus. "I was out in a farm state* a few days ago, and I found that the women generally had a firmer grip than the men in a handshake," said Udall, who need not worry about the crunch in his own clasp. "I think that is a commentary on conditions today." Something had to give before Marilyn Monroe, 35, could snuggle into a bikini for the filming of Something's Got to Give, and what gave was 15 lbs. of Marilyn. Current poundage is classified, but Marilyn's waist is down to a wispy 22 in., just what it was for her first movie, Scudda Hoo, Scudda Hay, 15 long years ago.

Still chasing records after 30 years of flying, blonde Aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran, 56, zippered into a blue flying suit and zipped out of New Orleans at the controls of a four-jet Lockheed Jetstar named Scarlett O'Hara. In Hanover, West Germany, 5,120 miles later (average speed: 489 m.p.h.), Cosmetics Queen Cochran, a onetime beauty-parlor odd-jobs girl who now owns Jacqueline Cochran, Inc., slipped into a suitably stylish Easter outfit, then stepped out to claim no fewer than 49 new flight records. (She already holds the ladies' speed mark: 842.6 m.p.h. in an Air Force T-38 jet.) Major new record claimed: longest straight-line distance in a jet piloted by a woman--2,279 miles from New Orleans to a refueling stop in Gander, Nfld.

A cum laude student at Williams who turned to interpreting another Williams on Broadway (Cat) and in Hollywood (Streetcar}, Method Director Elia Kazan, 52, finally won a scholastic laurel that eluded him when he graduated in 1930. For having brought "unfailingly high standards to all he has touched," "Gadge" Kazan was granted honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa.

"With me, everybody is a double act." cigar-chomping Comedian George Burns, 66, once said, and after 36 years as straight man to Gracie Allen's scatterbrained whimsy in the durable double act of Burns & Allen, it was hard for him to imagine being on his own. That was just where he found himself four years ago, when Wife Gracie, 56, decided to retire.

Last week Burns announced that he would debut next month at the Seattle World's Fair with a new double act. His partner: Comedienne Carol Charming, 41 ,the overgrown (5 ft. 9 in.) pixy who was diamond-digging Lorelei Lee in Broadway's long-running Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

The Eternal City was growing weary of the eternal triangle. "This vamp who destroys families and shucks husbands like a praying mantis," said Rome's Il Tempo, should be tossed out of Italy as an "undesirable." But Elizabeth Taylor, 30, and Richard Burton, 36, only went as far as a fishing village on the Tyrrhenian coast.

Two days later, Liz was back in Rome, and back in the hospital--recuperating from a lovers' quarrel that included what looked mighty like a black eye. At that, blonde Sybil Burton turned up in town to see if she could bring her wayward Welshman to heel, had their four-year-old daughter Kate flown in for added persuasion. "I'm finished," wailed Liz, gobbling sedatives "for my nerves." Not quite. 20th Century-Fox's Cleopatra still has the big suicide scene to shoot. The asp was waiting.

New York City snowed him under by 402,980 votes last Nov. 7, but San Juan., P.R., proved fair and warm for New York State Attorney General Louis J. Leflcowitz, 57. At its annual convention there, the National Association of Attorneys General elected as its president the G.O.P.'s luckless 1961 mayoral candidate.

Stilling a susurrus of speculation about her reasons for returning to Hollywood, Princess Grace, 32, postponed her comeback for at least a year--only to stir more talk about her reasons for staying away.

Director Alfred Hitchcock explained that with his current film behind schedule, he could not shoot Mamie, in which the princess was to play a compulsive thief, during Grace's summer visit to the U.S.

Monegasques had a homier answer: since Prince Rainier faces a summer showdown with France over his defiant refusal to modify Monaco's tax setup to suit Charles de Gaulle, she is staying home to give hubby some much needed moral support --and also to quiet rumors of a royal rift.

In "the best interests of professional boxing and the public," New York's Athletic Commission knocked surly Strongman Charles ("Sonny") Liston, 29, clear out of the state. His conduct in the ring was clean enough--33 wins in 34 pro bouts--but for his ragged record outside (including armed robbery and assault convictions), boxing's Bad Boy was denied a license that would have cleared the way for a $4,000,000 title bout with Heavyweight Champion Floyd Patterson in September. Seattle, Philadelphia and Chicago, suddenly interested in rehabilitating Sonny, weighed in with bids to replace New York as the fight site. At his Highland Mills, N.Y., training camp, Champion Patterson was sympathetic. "I've had a bad past too," said he, "I used to steal from fruit stores."

* North Dakota.

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