Oh no, everyone groaned politely at the Tokyo press conference. Ah yes, insisted suave old Cary Grant, 61, "You've probably seen me in my last picture as the romantic lead. I'm too old for that stuff. The kids today don't like to see me playing bedroom scenes with a young leading lady. It's unhealthy. It's unreasonable. Honestly, it's unpleasant." Well then, to change the subject, how did he feel, now that his bride of three months, sometime Actress Dyan Cannon, 27, is expecting a baby next May? "Ecstatic," beamed Cary, for whom it will be the first child in his four marriages. Later he explained that the way for a man to keep "pretty fit" offscreen is to "relax and lead a good, robust sex life."

When the sailing ships Porpoise and Cato foundered off eastern Australia one night in August 1803, Explorer Matthew Flinders led the 94 survivors to safety on a nearby sandspit, then sailed and rowed a small cutter 729 miles to Sydney for help. While Flinders is an Australian national hero--the first man to circumnavigate the continent--the theory persisted that his navigating was off when he recorded the wreckage at latitude 22DEG 11' south, longitude 155DEG 13' east. But that spot is precisely where an Australian underwater photographer named Ben Cropp last week, 162 years later, found the rotted hulls in the waters of the Coral Sea.

It was a lovely luncheon. Jacqueline Kennedy came, smartly dressed in a checked tweed coat, and the 200 construction workers, clad in khakis and cement dust, grinned delightedly over their lunchtime beers and sandwiches as she accompanied Architect Marcel Breuer on an inspection tour of the new Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. Meantime, at some less gritty feeds, old New Frontier Friend Nicole Alphand was swirling around town winding up a hectic month of goodbyes. Everyone was a little mournful now that French Ambassador Herve Alphand was taking his glittering wife back to Paris, where he will become Secretary General of the French Foreign Office. Said Dean Rusk, recalling Nicole's brilliant seven-year social reign in the capital: "I imagine Washington will once again be called a hardship post." Nicole shed some sentimental tears herself, but she did brighten up the farewells with such things as her black-silver-and-white dress by Cardin. Before flying home, the Alphands said their last U.S. farewell at a private dinner with Jackie Kennedy.

As an eminent man of letters who corresponded with James Thurber, T. S. Eliot, Harry Truman and others, Groucho Marx, 70, reported that the Library of Congress has asked him to donate his personal papers. "To back up the request, they said they had the first and second Gettysburg addresses and the Declaration of Independence." Anyway, Groucho will turn over some 300 letters to and from him, including, unfortunately, only a few notes from his late brothers, Chico and Harpo. "I don't think Harpo could write," said Groucho, "but Chico did write me once. I was in Macwahoc, Me., out fishing. Chico was in a crap game in Las Vegas and lost everything. He wrote me to come back and make a movie."

ZIP! went the paper airplanes around the room. It was the 31st-birthday reception of Japan's Crown Princess Michiko, who seemed to be spending most of her time folding missiles for her son Prince Hiro, 5, to buzz the photographers with. The princess expects a second child at the end of November.

Why, cheered Beatle George Harrison a while ago, "he's the daddy of us all!" Someone finally got around to asking the proud daddy-o himself about it when he arrived in London on an English concert tour. "Daddy of them?" winced Classical Guitarist Andres Segovia, 71. "The Beatles are very nice young men, no doubt, but their music is horrible. The electric guitar is an abomination. Who ever has heard of an electric violin? Or, for that matter, an electric singer?"

Gracious, lively and charming, said the reviewers in 1931 when the brother-and-sister act last went on in Broadway's The Band Wagon. Then the girl went off to get married, but Fred Astaire got along on his own. Now, 34 years later, at the biennial Philharmonic Ball in Rochester's Eastman mansion, Fred, 66, accepted the George Eastman House Award, then twinkled with Sister Adele Astaire Douglass, 67, through some of the old steps from Funny Face and Lady Be Good.

Who dumped the horse manure at Paddy Kennedy's pub? The Maharani of Cooch Behar did, with the help of a truck. "I couldn't resist," explained the maharani, former Model Gina Egan, because it was her old friend Paddy's birthday and he was throwing a blast for himself at his pub, The Star, in London's Belgravia Mews. "Paddy has always backed my racehorse Mack the Knife, and he's been complaining that he's always lost," the maharani went on, "so I decided to send him a birthday present from Mack."

Midst Laurels stood: Harvard University's Dr. Robert Burns Woodward, 48, named to receive the 1965 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his "contributions to the art of organic synthesis," notably his synthesis of chlorophyll in 1961; Dr. Julian Schwinger, 47, also of Harvard, Dr. Richard P. Feynman, 47, of the California Institute of Technology, and Dr. Shin-ichiro Tomonaga, 59, of the Tokyo University of Education, who will share the Nobel Prize for physics for their work, independent of one another, in defining the basic theories of quantum electrodynamics 20 years ago.

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