Colonnades and a Greek pediment make the front of the rambling country house look like a set from Gone With the Wind. And the old massa who lives there fits the movie title too: Nikita Khrushchev, still hale at 70 but "retired" to his rent-free government dacha outside Moscow on a pension of $330 a month. After weeks of conscientious sleuthing, U.P.I.'s Henry Shapiro reported other details. Wife Nina gets another $132, and a five-man staff and limousine are thrown in, courtesy of the current Soviet management, but Khrushchev rarely uses the car to go to the Moscow apartment reserved for his use. Shunning all but his closest friends and family, he spends his time hunting moose and hare, raising prize hogs, and experimenting with hybrid corn he got from Roswell Garst, an Iowa farmer who came to see him in 1955.

Ever since they met as students at the Sorbonne, Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, 59, and Novelist Simone de Beauvoir, 57, have been constant companions, though they deliberately refrained from becoming enmeshed in the bourgeois snare of matrimony. But now a little one is on the way--sort of. Sartre is adopting a daughter--Algerian-born Arlette Elkaim, 28, a movie critic on his magazine, Les Temps Modernes. Simone remains his good amie, but unless he leaves a will to the contrary, Arlette will be his legal heir. And while he spurned $53,000 worth of 1964 Nobel Prize money, his novels, plays, and current autobiography all sell at a distractingly bourgeois rate.

Backward, Christian soldiers, roared a British Salvation Army colonel, go ye not to James Bond movies, for the "maimed, tortured people who go screaming through them" are a menace to charity drives and highway safety. Meanwhile, 007 himself, Cinemactor Sean Connery, 34, was raising funds for a newspaper charity by attending the London premiere of The Yellow RollsRoyce, sporting a beard grown on vacation and his wife, Cinemactress Diane Cilento, 31, who was sporting a white fur coat.

In the country of the bland, the one-eyed Man in the Hathaway Shirt was a sensation when he appeared in 1951. In those days he was a debonair White Russian, Baron George Wrangel, replaced a year ago by Colin Fox, a dashing British solo Atlantic sailor. Nonetheless, Ellerton F. Jette, 65, retiring this month as president of Maine's C. F. Hathaway Co., admitted that the original suggestion by Adman David Ogilvy to use an "injured man" as a symbol gave Jette the shudders. "Why stress an unfortunate aspect, such as partial blindness?" he asked. He soon found his answer: it sure sold shirts.

Faced with a refusal by trustees to extend visiting hours for women in the dormitories from 9 p.m. until midnight on all Fridays, the editors of the Daily Princetonian decided that "coeducation is the solution for Princeton's social illness. The development of a young man's mind," purred the Tiger cubs disarmingly, "is not only not impeded but is enhanced by normal contact with women." Princeton's President Robert F. Goheen, 45, was not about to be mousetrapped. He reserved comment "until my next press conference" (as yet unscheduled), but he covered the topic pretty well the last time it came up--in December. "Princeton," he said then, "doesn't have any social problems coeducation would cure."

Bye, baby bunting, Daddy's flown back to Paris for conferences, but since Daddy is Conductor Herbert von Karajan, 56, who is an expert skier, sailor, amateur racing driver and pilot, his family, staying on to holiday in St.-Moritz, did their best to keep time with the maestro. Four-year-old Isabella tried skiing, and, said Mama Eliette von Karajan, 29: "She shows lots of courage, more than I did. She goes down the slope headfirst." One-year-old Arabelle stuck to sleigh riding, while Eliette, recovering from the flu, found watching the kids have their fun sport enough.

He keeps telling folks that he's feeling "fine, just fine." And they keep asking how he is, again and again. So Boston's frail but sparkling Richard Cardinal Gushing, 69, finally took not to his bed but to verse to answer all the questions in his archdiocesan newspaper, The Pilot:

I live out in Brighton, close to B.C.,*

And I'm just as healthy as I can be.

I have arthritis in both my knees

And when I must speak, then I talk with a wheeze.

My pulse is weak, and my blood is quite thin,

But I'm awfully well for the shape that I'm in.

Nothing uncertain about this trumpet in West Point's magazine, The Pointer. General of the Army Omar Bradley, 71, blared that Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, 77, was "so darn scared" that he let 40,000 Germans slip through an Allied ring in France at the battle of Falaise Gap in August 1944. The Bulova watch-company executive's censure was a relatively mild one in the 20-year-old Anglo-American wrangle over Who Mucked Up World War II the Most, but one civilian already had combat fatigue. Snorted the London Daily Mirror's columnist Cassandra, known to a few friends as William Connor, 55: "Nothing could have exceeded the stupidity of the generals of the first World War. Nothing could exceed the garrulity of the generals of the second."

* Boston College to down-Westerners.

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