He always looked and sounded like the ruggedest of his rugged breed. Yet three months after cigar-chomping General Curtis E. LeMay, 58, retired as Air Force Chief of Staff, the Pentagon revealed that he had suffered a slight attack of Bell's palsy back in 1942, was also troubled by a pesky prostate, impaired hearing and poor eyesight. As a result, medics pronounced LeMay "60% disabled," which means he gets 60% of his $16,500 annual retirement pay tax free (but he will still be allowed to pilot his private plane). In 35 years of service, said the doctors, there was bound to be "some wear and tear."

Was there just the hint of a double chin? It wouldn't be surprising, for Monaco's Princess Grace is 35. But even when Mom becomes a full-fledged matron catching the more mature gazes, the family will still have a girl to turn younger heads. Arriving in the U.S. for a kinsfolk wedding, eight-year-old Princess Caroline flashed a cool smile of her own, asked, "Mummy, will you let me be an actress when I grow up?" Murmured Mummy, who says she'll never make another film herself, "You're already an actress, darling."

As the oldest (87) and senior (53 years on Capitol Hill) U.S. Senator, Arizona's Carl Hayden deemed it only proper to set two Princeton profs straight on U.S. history. A passage in their textbook American Democracy and Practice, he pointed out, "is not in accord with the latest edition of the Congressional Directory, which indicates I was re-elected in 1962." That was putting it mildly. The book says Hayden died in 1962.

He is only one of twelve famed photographers whose works are displayed in a show at Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art in Manhattan, and among his best are moving shots of poor and elderly Britons. However, Lord Snowdon, 35, gets those when he goes on charity missions with his wife, Princess Margaret. Glamour is still his forte. Hit of the show is a study of Actor Peter Sellers' wife, Britt Ecklund, looking as palely exquisite as a drowned Ophelia.

Night after night, when the last concertgoer and cleaning woman were long gone, Carnegie Hall filled again with the sound of genius. Alone at his piano in the center of the very stage where he made his U.S. debut in 1928, Vladimir Horowitz, 60, played on and on--but never for the public. Finally, after twelve years of self-imposed retirement, the pianist announced he would perform one more concert next week. Some 1,500 fans formed a grim, silent queue for tickets, which were so scarce that even Walter Toscanini, Arturo's boy and Horowitz's own brother-in-law, had to stand in line for three hours.

"I'm a House of Commons man," he used to growl, and Winston Churchill firmly turned down all offers of a peerage, which would have barred him from his beloved Commons. He did be come a Knight of the Garter, though, so that people called him "Sir Winston" and his wife "Lady Churchill." Now the Queen, on the advice of the Prime Minister, has appointed Churchill's widow to a life barony. Thus, as Lady Churchill in her own right, Clementine Hozier Churchill, 80, will sit where Winnie never would--in the House of Lords, or "another place," as Commons men call it. A government spokesman explained: "It would give great pleas ure to the nation if she could be persuaded to take some part, however small, in public life."

It's those codes again. One slip of the finger, and someone trying to dial long distance to the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., gets the Brown house at 78-29 61st Street, Queens, N.Y. Since last summer, Housewife Rose Brown has had the same phone number--456-1414--as Lyndon Baines Johnson, except that her area code is 212 while his is 202. When he heard about it, L.B.J. dashed off a letter thanking Mrs. Brown for her "diplomacy and warmth," promised in return to "do the best that we can in handling calls for the Brown family."

Strolling along the canals and bar-lined alleys of Amsterdam's famed red-light district, the woman in a frumpy fright-wig, dark-rimmed glasses, and scuffed shoes might have been a sauntering strumpet or a wandering washerwoman. Actually, it was Princess Beatrix of Holland, 27. Like any visiting college kid, she was acquiring "a firsthand knowledge of social welfare conditions." That's what the palace said.

Ever since Arizona's Smokis (a group of businessmen formed to preserve Indian tradition) made him an honorary chief a year ago, Barry Goldwater, 56, has been using a ballpoint pen to inscribe his badge of office on his left thumb: a dime-sized blue crescent. The mark is supposed to be permanently inscribed, so when Barry arrived in Paris on a five-week European tour, he dropped into the Pigalle shop of "Tattoo Bruno," known to his friends as the Michelangelo of the needle. Next day Goldwater inserted a little needle of his own. On an Anglo-American Press Association podium, he introduced himself as "the trigger-happy S.O.B. who advocated hitting supply routes in North Viet Nam." Then he grinned: "This is now called 'statesmanship.' "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.