Beauty contestants should be seen and not heard. But not the new Miss America, who is a ventriloquist and thus has two voices. The night she reached the finals, Vonda Kay Van Dyke, 21, of Phoenix, chirruped: "Barry Goldwater, here I come!" But once the crown was in place, she became a benign queen, and said: "I think the President is our greatest man." Then she was off for a series of nationwide appearances that will earn her $75,000, in addition to the $11,000 in scholarships she will use next fall at the State University. The other girls were already on their way back to school. But from their pictures with Her Loveliness, it was clear that even a loser in Atlantic City is a winner on any campus.

From France to the U.N. Secretariat in Manhattan came a stained-glass memorial on the themes of peace and love: a 12-ft. by 15-ft. panel designed without fee by Painter Marc Chagall, 77, as his remembrance of U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. "A poet always uses the same vocabulary," says Chagall, and his translucent sonnet displays his familiar metaphors of thin-lipped cow, floating patriarch and spiritual chicken. In Pocantico Hills, N.Y., the preserve of the Rockefellers, the Union Church received a stained-glass Chagall window depicting the good Samaritan, to be dedicated by the family to the memory of Philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr.

His life has been as bitter as his father's darkest tragedies, and Shane O'Neill, 45, Eugene's disinherited son, believes he suffers from a tribal curse.

His brother, Eugene Jr., committed suicide; his first child, Eugene III, smothered at the age of three months. And, like his father's mother, the model for Mrs. Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night, Shane has been for 20 years a drug addict. Last spring in Manhattan, he was arrested for trying to steal prescription blanks to obtain narcotics. Last week, calling him "the most bedraggled, woebegone man ever to come before this bench," the judge gave Shane a suspended sentence. Perhaps his luck is changing: with some $200,000 his wife recently inherited, he has promised to settle with her in Ireland to start life anew.

"Float like a butterfly" could be a tall order for Cassius Clay, 22, who at a portly 230 Ibs. is surely the world's heavyweight something, but not, apparently, its boxing champion anymore. Scoring the TKO it has threatened ever since it started investigating the rank finances of February's fight, the World Boxing Association stripped Cassius of his title when he signed in Boston for a Nov. 16 rematch with Sonny Listen. Unfazed, the Lip zipped to Manhattan to bedizen his ample middle with a $500 gold-plated championship belt from Ring Magazine. Verbally, he still stings like a bee. Gazing at the solid silver waistband Charley Mitchell won for going a bare-knuckle 39 rounds against John L. Sullivan in 1888, Muhammad AH bumbled: "They got cheap with the belts. They used to make them better." Maybe they did the fighters too.

Three large yellow and white vans from Washington pulled up at the 85th Street entrance of a Fifth Avenue apartment, and unloaded the toys, clothes and furniture of Jacqueline Kennedy, 35, Caroline, 6, and John Jr., 3. Meanwhile Jackie, staying at the nearby Carlyle Hotel, went through the autumn whirligig of a Manhattan mother, supervising the redecoration of her 15-room duplex, which will be ready in a month or so, enrolling Caroline at the 91st Street Academy of the Sacred Heart, taking John for a ride on the Central Park carrousel. And then one day, she was out with her children rowing on the Central Park Serpentine, where an alert amateur in the next dinghy took an incredulous look, rapidly unshuttered his Rolleiflex to capture a metropolitan Manet.

The Wall Street banker's daughter astonished the Russians this summer by asking for an iron so she could press her own dresses. And Neva Rockefeller, 20, who was visiting Nikita Khrushchev with her father David, is independent in other ways. A Radcliffe junior and aspiring playwright, she made known her engagement last week to Gerald Michael Medearis, 24, a St. Louis public-school graduate, who interrupted his Harvard education for four years to "find himself" by working in a Hollywood sound studio.

Ill lay: Los Angeles' James Francis Cardinal Mclntyre, 78, in a Rome hospital following his collapse from heat and fatigue during the Mass officially reopening the Vatican Council; New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman, 75, recuperating on Cape Cod following a prostate operation; Japan's Premier Hayato Ikeda, 64, undergoing treatment at the National Cancer Institute in To kyo for a nonmalignant throat infection; Massachusetts' Senator Leverett Saltonstall, 72, recovering at his home in Dover from a torn te'ndon suffered in a fall at Boston's Logan Airport.

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