Two queens make quite a pair--especially in Hollywood, where one leading lady ordinarily fills a house. But Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, both 54. have much in common. Both have had four husbands, won Oscars and published autobiographies. Now the royal twosome are cast as starring partners in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, a story of two feuding sisters, both fading film stars. Whatever happens on location between the two perennial upstagers has the producers already counting columns of juicy publicity.

HAROLDS CLUB OR BUST! read signs plastered all over the U.S. West, luring millions of Americans to the biggest gambling joint in Reno. So profitable was the lavish emporium of slot machines, roulette, and blackjack tables that the original outlay of $600 by its owners, a thrifty family of Vermonters named Smith, paid off $16,675,000 when they sold last week to a Manhattan syndicate. Still spinning the club's wheel of chance as manager: Harold S. Smith, son of the founder and author of an autobiography aptly titled I Want to Quit Winners.

Miss Britain quit to ban the bomb and Miss U.S.A. wailed: "My mouth is actually sore from smiling." But the smiles were just beginning for the grocer's daughter from Argentina, who proved to have the most universal appeal at the contest in Miami: Norma Beatriz Nolan, Miss Universe of 1962, a rare blend of Irish, Italian and Spanish, statistically 24, 5 ft. 6 in., 120 lbs. and 35-25-36. The perquisites of office are $15,000 cash and a $7,000 mink coat; the duties include promotional tours of Portugal, Korea, Canada, Mexico and all points south. But Norma showed signs of taking it all in stride. Asked if she could twist, she replied, "Is it really necessary?"

Only a $15-a-week steno when she sailed from London two years ago, Toni Avril Gardiner, 21, was back home again. As Princess Muna al Hussein, wife of Jordan's King Hussein, she checked into the palatial Dorchester Hotel with 27 satchels of finery, then toured the town in a murmuring maroon Bentley with a Scotland Yard escort on a shopping expedition to buy toys for her five-month-old son. And wasn't it fun to lunch at Buckingham Palace? Said the Princess: "I just hope I don't drop anything--any of those forks and spoons."

The mystery guest was ensconced in his isolation booth, and the panelists on NBC's noonday quiz show Your First Impression tried to guess his identity from his spur-of-the-moment responses to a series of unfinished questions:

Q.: The one thing I hate to do is ...

A.: Lose.

Q.: I feel uncomfortable when . . .

A.: I forget my lines.

Q.: You'd never catch me wearing . . .

A.: A bow tie.

Q.: Nothing makes a man look sillier than . . .

A.: Falling on his face.

Q.: You could never get me to ...

A.: Quit.

Q.: If I could be a moment in history, I'd be . . .

A.: President.

Q.: My only regret is . . .

A.: I wasn't assigned to a PT boat.

The panel guessed Richard Nixon's identity easily.

After Britain's small but noisy neo-Nazi movement provoked a Trafalgar Square riot with anti-Semitic speeches two weeks ago, a pro-Labor country squire, Lord Walston, wrote the London Observer an angry letter calling for extensive laws to curb excesses in public speech. Replying a week later, mischievous Satirist Evelyn Waugh, 59, penned his own modest proposal to the lord. Wrote Waugh: "May I commend to him a group whose interests, I am sure, lie near his heart: his own peers? . . . They have, like the Jews, been the objects of frequent, atrocious attack. They are now held up continuously to hatred and contempt in newspapers and on the stage of this kingdom. I trust that Lord Walston's proposed act will make it criminal to express any opinions derogatory to these admirable fellow subjects."

It was hot by the Ligurian Sea. Her hair, done up in a bun, hung down in humid strings about her face and neck. He was rumpled. Both were tired from filming Jean-Paul Sartre's The Condemned of Altona in the town of Tirrenia. In one of those private moments that public figures rarely show the world, Sophia Loren wrapped her brawny arms around Carlo Ponti, her short, balding spouse, in a tender Neapolitan embrace. The photographers were not far away.

In his 26 years as a Congressman, Illinois Republican Noah Morgan Mason counted himself a lone voice speaking out against "socialistic government," a view that resulted in plenty of advice but little consent to New Deal, Fair Deal and Eisenhower programs alike. Now 82, the per snickety Welshman will retire this July 31. But "not to hibernate," he said. "I plan to become a missionary to the liberal heathen of the Hill . . . preaching conservatism to those members who yet may be saved to a happier future."

Asleep in his mother's arms throughout his first press conference, the three-week-old Earl of St. Andrews was soundly pro claimed by Fleet Street's eagle-eyed editors to look just like his dad. Son of Prince Edward and Katharine, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, the titled but yet unchristened infant earl--tenth in line to the British throne--has an imperial adventure ahead. Along with his father, a captain in the Royal Scots Greys, he will soon move to Hong Kong as the transferred regiment's unofficial mascot.

In London's High Court of Justice sat portly Plutocrat Nubar Gulbenkian, 66, the orchid in his buttonhole quivering at the slow progress of his suit against BBC. The son of the late oil mogul Calouste ("Mr. Five Percent") Gulbenkian sought to force BBC to turn over a recording of a 1959 interview in which he complained that the administrators of his father's estate were withholding a part of his inheritance. Barely pausing to eat, Gulbenkian lunched daily in a court anteroom on caviar canapes, truffled ham laced with port, cutlets in aspic and glazed duckling, Belgian raspberries and Italian peaches--eased down with whisky and lager. Between mouthfuls, Nubar explained: "I do this to keep up my spirits." When judgment was reserved, the natty trencherman rolled away in the London taxi rebuilt to his taste by Rolls-Royce.

Metropolis by metropolis, New York City's Robert F. Wagner Jr. was taking the measure of some dozen European cities during a month-long vacation.

Strictly tourist--even to amazed airline officials, tourist class--the mayor, his wife and two boys, flew to Rome, where Wagner found the Eternal City in the midst of a mayoralty squabble. Then to Berlin, where he inspected the Wall, commenting: "It's the same as if you needed a passport to get from Brooklyn to Manhattan." He lunched with Frankfurt's Burgermeister and dropped in on bucolic Nastatten (pop. 2,600), from which his father, the late U.S. Senator, emigrated. Made an honorary citizen, Wagner asked if he could vote in the city elections. The literal Germans replied: No.

Her marriage to the late Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas was a never-ending hurricane of flying crockery, and in Leftover Life to Kill, her chronicle of that 17-year clash of egos, Caitlin Thomas, 47, sometimes wondered how she and the tosspot genius avoided killing each other. Now, in a "Not Quite Posthumous Letter to My Daughter" in Harper's, irascible, Celtic-tongued Caitlin has some heartfelt advice for her 18-year-old: "Stick, my child, for goodness' sake, to creating babies, washing nappies, and crooning lullabies. A woman's place, as Dylan never ceased to tell me in vain, is in the bed or at the sink, and the extent of her travels should be from one to the other and back . . . Even if in reality her yielding shell contains a hard-boiled yolk of mercenary ambition, she must serve up her garnished egg at the table of male delectation, all a-shake and atremble with soft-boiled, running-over compliance. It means that the stress must insistently be on the symbols of femininity: bust, bum, legs, lips."

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