"Many years ago," observed Maine's Senator Margaret Chase Smith, 66, at a dinner in Manhattan, "the word square was one of the most honored words in our vocabulary. The square deal was an honest deal. A square meal was a full and good meal. It was the square shooter rather than the sharpshooter who was admired. What is a square today? He's the fellow who never learned to get away with it, who gets choked up when the flag unfurls. There has been too much glorification of the angle players, the corner cutters, and the goof-offs. One of America's greatest needs is for more people who are square."

Pittsburgh Financier Andrew Mellon built Washington's $15 million National Gallery of Art in 1937 to house the $50 million art collection he assembled with the aid of Dealer Joseph Duveen. His son, Paul Mellon, 57, a perceptive critic in his own right, has assembled a second superb collection of 18th and 19th century British painting. Now it looks as though the younger Mellon will build another public gallery in Washington for his 500-odd works of art, which are now hung in Mellon's various homes except when the paintings go on tour. Last week he appointed Dennis Farr, 35, a curator of London's Tate Gallery, to plan the project.

Manhattan's Doctors Hospital, a fashionable stork pad for East Side society, was dismayed. But West Side Story Star Carol Lawrence, 30, was determined. After taking a $40 stamina-building course in what its fans these days call "educated childbirth," she wanted that "do-it-yourself feeling." So she did it and felt it, and two weeks after 7-lb. 9-oz. Christopher was delivered, she held a press conference to tell about it. "It beats any show I've been to," trilled Carol, who had stayed awake all through her own production and was later told by her doctor, "You did that with great flair." The hospital wouldn't let her husband, Singer Robert Goulet, 31, in on the act, but that was just as well, since he had refused to take the educated-fatherhood course.

He's accustomed to being called a philanderer, but when he was labeled a philanthropist, Richard Burton reacted as if it were a dirty word. The ruckus started when Bertrand Russell's "Peace Foundation" announced that Burton was giving it all his British earnings. Not so, cried Richard. He had merely donated a few pounds and did not agree with Lord Bertie's anti-American jeremiads. In fact, deadpanned the actor, he gives most of his loose pence to the Invalid Tricycle Foundation of Wales (for crippled miners). Wife Liz had a different challenge. For a Lido opening in Paris, the invitations specified evening pajamas, and half the haut monde came in lace or sequined trousers. Not Liz. "I.wear slacks to work," she sniffed, threw on her gold lame sari by Balenciaga, and discovered that in spite of being so old-gown, she rated Table Numero Un between two boulevardiers who could afford to clothe her in pure gold: Aristotle Onassis and Baron Guy de Rothschild.

Gagging for a gaggle of admirers, Drumbeatle Ringo Starr, 24, gave one last panorama of his aching tonsils before checking in at London's University College Hospital to have them clipped. "I feel fine," he croaked, which by a furry coincidence is the title of the longhairs' latest disk--and thanks to Ringo's sick publicity, it is at the top of London lists. After doctors executed the mop-top's op, a BBC announcer flubbed: "Ringo Starr's toenails were successfully removed." He should have been condemned to the switchboard for the hard day's night that followed.

At the ripe old age of seven, Kelso is planning to retire. But the richest horse in history (total winnings: $1,900,000) aims to keep busy, says his owner, Mrs. Richard C. du Pont, 50, of the Delaware clan. Accepting a couple of trophies for him at a Thoroughbred Racing Association meeting in Manhattan, she said: "Kelso would like to help guarantee the welfare of future generations of horses." Since he is a gelding, he will do that by making fund-raising appearances for veterinary research.

Wearing shoes, stockings, a back brace and pajamas, Teddy Kennedy, 32, inched off his orthopedic bed in Boston's New England Baptist Hospital, then took his first steps since he broke his back in a plane crash last June. He walked ten feet, but the effort was so great that he could only grin and nod thanks to his doctors. Nonetheless, the junior Senator from Massachusetts swore afterward that he will walk out of the hospital in time to spend Christmas with his family in Palm Beach.

As the barracks-room balladeer who found oompah in Empah, he was famed at 25 from Mafeking to Mandalay. But in the eyes of his parents, young Rudyard Kipling was a light that seemed likely to fail. To his mother Alice, he had "a great deal that is feminine in his nature." His father, John Lockwood Kipling, a museum director in India, summoned Ruddy from school in England at 17 in hopes that working as a reporter on a Lahore newspaper might stiffen his spine. In a series of 14 letters to the boy's headmaster in Devonshire, Papa Kipling grumped: "I don't think he is of the stuff to resist temptation. Journalism seems invented for such desultory souls." Far from desultory was the bidding in London last week, where the Ruddy correspondence sold for a red-blooded $12,600.

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