The only American prizewinner to turn down President Kennedy's invitation to the recent White House dinner for Nobel laureates finally explained why. "It's 100 miles away," drawled Novelist William Faulkner, 64, in Charlottesville, Va., where he lectures part-time at the University of Virginia. "That's a long way to go just to eat."

"There were those who had experienced the strength of his convictions and were a little frightened by him," said Dwight D. Eisenhower to 2,000 guests at services dedicating Princeton's John Foster Dulles Library of Diplomatic History, a two-story granite structure where his personal papers and 40,000 microfilmed state documents are stored. But these very convictions bound Ike and his late Secretary of State in "a trust, a common faith that was never for a second broken." Said he: "To his character, insight and courage I owe a terrific debt. This is a better world because of him."

Scowling ferociously, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, 55, wanted the Senate Appropriations subcommittee to get one thing straight. "I object to having the term 'bomber man' applied to me," he said, even as he was urging Congress to lay out $491 million for the long-range RS-70 bomber, $320 million more than the Administration wanted. "I will use the most effective weapons system that will do the job. If that's kiddie cars, I'll use kiddie cars."

Fun is fun, but there are distractions. Touring Europe together, Hollywood's recently divorced Natalie Wood, 23, and Actor Warren Beatty, 25, arrived at the

Cannes Film Festival. But then the girl, who was born Natasha Gurdin to Russian emigre parents, met the Russian delegation to the festival. She joined a Soviet cinemactress in a duet of melancholy Russian folk songs, later chatted happily in the language she learned as a child.

Summoned back to Government service after a nine-year hiatus was Mrs. Eugenie Anderson, 52, quietly elegant Minnesota Democrat who became the first woman ambassador in U.S. history when Harry Truman sent her to Denmark in 1949.

Her new post, the first since she returned in 1953 to her 400-acre Red Wing estate on the Mississippi: Minister to Bulgaria.

New York's two G.O.P. Senators share more than a party label, a liberal philosophy and a geographic bond. After taping a TV interview at a Washington sound studio, balding Senior Senator Jacob Javits, 58, and white-thicketed Junior Senator Kenneth Keating, 62. celebrated their common birthday--May 18--by puffing out the candles on a pair of personalized cakes. Thoughtful to a fault, Keating came up with a special gift for campaign-bound Colleague Javits, up for re-election this fall: two packets of foot balm.

In 32 years of reserve service, Arizona's Republican Senator Barry M. Goldwater, 53, had few commands he could relish more. Recently promoted to major general, Goldwater accepted his new two-star flag in a Pentagon ceremony and took over the 999th Air Force Reserve Squad ron, a catchall Capitol Hill unit that includes 13 Democrats -- three Senators and ten Congressmen.

"Ever since Adam," said the platinum blonde in the sequined sheath, "man has been the leader and woman has followed.

Now that the twist is here, everybody's on his own." With a squat of the hips and a throaty gurgle, Hope Hampton, a film star of the '20s who found the fountain of youth, accepted a silver loving cup at Manhattan's Camelot Club with the inscription, "Outstanding Twist Personality of 1962" -- an ephemeral accolade authenticated by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which, in its 1962 Book of the Year, illustrates the twist with a Hopeful view.

Into New York State Supreme Court charged agents of the State Rent Com mission to settle a spat involving a long-clawed cat. The cat belongs to Acting U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, 53, and occupies an honored place in his well-appointed eleven-room digs on Manhattan's East Side. The man who sublets the place had been charging Thant $1,200 a month until the commission sued him for rent gouging and demanded $51,700 triple damages on Thant's behalf. Not at all, protested the landlord. The gouge was on the other side. Thant's cat "tore the dam ask curtains, ripped up the carpets and upholstery," and left him with $6,447 in damages. Thant's aides were skeptical.

Said one: "I don't think one cat could do all that." The only reason he was sitting it out at home the night that 168 celebrities were attending the White House blowout for French Cultural Affairs Minister Andre Malraux, explained Columnist Leonard Lyons, 55, was that he had unwittingly written himself right off the guest list.

Over cocktails with French Ambassador Herve Alphand a few weeks earlier, the adroit name-dropper dropped into Al-phand's pocket a list of U.S. cultural leaders (among them: Tennessee Williams, Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern) who had never been accorded the Legion d'Honneur. As White House Aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later told Lyons: "You were to have been invited, but the French ambassador suddenly brought in a long guest list--and it left no room for you." At Horizon House, a five-room cottage for the disabled at New York University's Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Joseph P. Kennedy, 73, was coming along fine. "We think he has made real improvement," beamed Director Howard A. Rusk, "especially in the last ten days. He is getting a lot of words out." To show how well he was recuperating from his Dec. 19 stroke in Palm Beach, the senior Kennedy took several steps for his son Jack, who was in Manhattan for a Madison Square Garden rally celebrating his 45th birthday. But mostly he just sat with his son in a garden and chatted. Said Joe Kennedy: "I'd rather talk than walk." Struck for 2 1/2 days by 700 waiters, cooks, bellhops and elevator operators, Manhattan's gilded Waldorf-Astoria bravely carried on. Accountants clapped j together tuna-fish sandwiches as substitutes for halibut thermidor. At a $25-a-plate dinner attended by Vice President Lyndon Johnson, the lobster bisque was omitted for fear that clerks and junior executives would slop it all over the 1,200 guests. Even Bossman Conrad (Be My Guest) Hilton, 74. saw emergency service. During a party on the 18th-floor Starlight Roof, the hustling hosteler slipped behind the bar to mix a drink for New Mexico Governor Edwin Mechem. But it was not a real test. All Mechem wanted was bourbon and water.

To keep his collection of 35 impressionist and post-impressionist paintings from falling into the hands of Riviera art thieves, Novelist Somerset Maugham, 88, put the lot on the block. But no sooner had Sotheby's gaveled them off for $1,466,864 than Lady John Hope, wife of Britain's Minister of Works and Maugham's only child, protested that nine of the paintings weren't his to begin with. Claiming that assorted works by Renoir. Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet and Matisse had been deeded to her by her father, she filed suit against Sotheby's for $648,900. The old storyteller, who plans to give the money to help needy authors, let it be known that he was "very distressed and unhappy."

Faces averted, Italian Industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini, 67. and Soprano Maria Callas, 38, met for the first time in more than two years to run through an off-key duet before a Milan magistrate. Seeking a ruling that would reduce Maria's slice of an estimated $1,000,000 in common property by declaring her the "guilty party" in their marital split, Meneghini puffed into court under a load of clippings and photographs chronicling her friendship with Greek Shipowner Aristotle Onassis. The court reserved decision, but not Maria. Trilled she: "Those photographs prove nothing."

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