A rapturous audience, including Princess Margaret, called Ballerina Margot Fonteyn, 45, and her costar, Rudolf Nureyev, back for 43 curtain calls after the London premiere of the Royal Ballet's new production of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. The love story backstage was more poignant than Shakespeare's tale. In the wings, from his stretcher, Fonteyn's husband, Panamanian Politician Roberto Arias, 46, watched, still paralyzed from the chest down by the bullets pumped into his spine by a frustrated office seeker in Panama last June.

Three weeks after Sir Winston Churchill's death, his will was published in London. He left an estate valued at $744,950 after death duties, consisting principally of his London home and his Surrey stud farm, and bequeathed one-third to his widow Clementine and the rest to his four children. The will did not represent the bulk of Churchill's wealth, derived from book royalties estimated at $3,000,000; that was in a trust, set up in 1946 for his children and grandchildren, and under Crown law exempt from death duties.

Visiting Washington to collect a National Medal of Science for his "contributions to scientific knowledge," Chemist Harold Urey, 71, recalled that when he developed heavy water in 1931 he never dreamed that his discovery would win the Nobel Prize or, for that matter, become a vital ingredient in the making of the atomic bomb. "I thought it might have some practical use," he said, plaintively, "in something like neon signs."

"It was like A Thousand and One Nights," wrote one awed critic. He was dazzled by the floodlights, befurred lovelies and police cordons restraining the spectators outside Milan's Teatro Nuovo, where Producer Dino de Laurentiis was premiering Three Faces of a Woman, starring his latter-day Scheherazade, Princess Soraya, 32. Iran's former Empress arrived in a Rolls-Royce, wearing green silk to match her eyes, with diamonds insured for $1,000,000. And her on-screen performance--well, what did it matter? Said Rome's Paese Sera gently: "She has the attributes for becoming a real actress."

Once upon a time in 1960, New York Democratic Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, 56, called a Harlem housewife named Esther James a "bagwoman," meaning, in Harlem patois, that she was a graft collector for the police department. Mrs. James, declaring her innocence, won a $46,500 libel judgment against him, but thanks to his intricate legal dodges, it may be a long time before she collects. Nonetheless, Mrs. James's bag, in theory at least, should be comfortably full. Last week the State Supreme Court in Manhattan awarded her an extra $163,500, as a result of Adam's stalls.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, Gospel Singer Mahalia Jackson, 53, devoutly believes, and when medics told her that she would be able to resume her career despite the heart attack she suffered five months ago, "I went to a Catholic Mass and prayed," she said, in her Chicago home. "I'm a Baptist, but I believe there's only one God." One thing taken away for good, however, with the aid of a diet, are 50 of Mahalia's original 250 Ibs. "Doctors say I have to lose at least 25 more Ibs.," she laughs, "But I'm afraid I'll end up looking like a skeleton."

He voted for Barry Goldwater in November, and so when the ex-Senator (a twelve-handicapper) turned up with his golf clubs for the pro-amateur round in the Phoenix Open, G.M. Test Driver Wilbur Allen, 38, zoomed out to catch his hero's performance. "Any mulligans?" hollered Barry jovially to the crowd. But he certainly didn't need any free shots, slamming 200-yd. drives until on the sixth hole he hooked the ball into the spectators, specifically Wilbur Allen. Allen ended up in Mesa Lutheran Hospital with several stitches in his cheek; but medicare hasn't gained a partisan, for Goldwater is footing the bills.

Luci Baines Johnson, 17, who graduates from the National Cathedral School in June, is applying to the Jesuits' Georgetown University School of Nursing, where a four-year course leads to a bachelor of science degree. If accepted, she can live at home, which will be fine with her father, the Secret Service, and her best beau Paul Betz, 20, a pre-med at close-enough Mount Saint Mary's College in Maryland.

"Ciao!" cried Italy's Marcello Mastroianni, 40, when he spied Gina Lollobrigida, 36, at New York's Kennedy Airport, and Gina offered a luscious cheek for him to kiss. When Mastroianni flew on to Hollywood, he discovered Adulation American Style, which is no dolce vita. Shrieking females mobbed him at the airport, including one pretty creature, who pursued him, hallooing "Marcello, I love you!" She was there again next day when he cemented his footprints outside Graumann's Chinese Theater and this time he obligingly kissed her (she fainted). But he balked when another horde tried to drag him up to dance in a discotheque. "Fantastico!" he muttered. "I had to hit one of them over the head twice. And she actually seemed to enjoy it."

Since Generalissimo Francisco Franco, 72, would ahunting go, Spain's entire Cabinet joined him at his "el Pardo" reserve in the frosty hills of Guadarrama. Though a number of ministers shivered under their parkas in the shooting stands, el Caudillo happily tilted his rifle at wild boar and stag, wearing merely a sweater beneath his business suit. At day's end, he democratically announced only the group's total bag of 76 assorted animals, one of which was nailed by Francisco Franco Martinez Bordiu, 11, the dictator's grandson and namesake.

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