"You don't know the duke's face when he sees those envelopes that hold bills!" winced the Duchess of Windsor, 69. She does, and so on a visit to Manhattan, Her Grace, who was enshrined in the Fashion Hall of Fame seven years ago, reported that she's been skimping on the haute couture lately. "That navy blue coat I wore the other day is two years old," she sighed. "When my maid packed my bags, she said, 'Madame, some of these evening dresses have gone to Palm Beach with you three times.' I'm hoping nobody will remember."

San Francisco State College's famed Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa has no illusions. When ETC., the quarterly review of the International Society for General Semantics, devoted a special issue to LSD and other psychedelic drugs, Editor Hayakawa chose a few acid words for acid heads. Wrote he: "Most people haven't learned to use the senses they possess. I not only hear music, I listen to it. I find the colors of the day such vivid experiences that I sometimes pound my steering wheel with excitement. And I say, why disorient your beautiful senses with drugs and poisons before you have half discovered what they can do for you?"

This time the lift-off was awfully slow, but former Astronaut John Glenn, 44, didn't mind a bit. Bumping up the slopes on the T-bar at Stowe, Vt., Glenn pronounced the terrestrial view "beautiful" and prepared all systems for the descent. Thoroughly cured of the inner-ear trouble that caused him to yaw and pitch two years ago, after he whacked his head on a bathtub, Glenn roared down the slopes with perfect balance and later lamented that he doesn't have a chance to practice more, seeing as he lives down around Houston, where he still works as a NASA consultant.

Luci Johnson's August wedding promises to be quite a production, but it couldn't be any livelier than the one Hubert Humphrey is cooking up. His second son, Robert, 22, a junior at Minnesota's Mankato State College, will marry Collegemate Donna Erickson, 21, on July 9 in Minneapolis, and since the Vice President loves a party, he is turning over his eight-room house in Waverly, Minn., for the blowout reception. Hubert even promised the kids he'd bring Herb Alpert's stomping Tijuana Brass band to the party, and with all the Humphreys whooping on top of that, Waverly (pop. 580) ought to be the noisiest town north of the Pedernales.

Jacqueline Kennedy will be speaking practically nothing but Spanish this month. She flies off to Buenos Aires with Caroline and John-John to spend an Easter holiday on the cattle ranch of former Argentine Foreign Minister Miguel Carcano, an old family friend. After a good week's riding on the pampas, Jackie will bring the children back to Manhattan for a short rest, then set off for more Spanish and horses, this time as guest of the Duchess of Alba at Seville's muy pintoresca Spring Fair.

Pia Lindstrom, 27, was firm about one thing. "I would be very happy to become a fine actress like my mother," she said in Rome. "But I am not competing with her." On the face of it, Pia could give her mother, Ingrid Bergman, some pretty fair competition, though she wasn't looking like Joan of Arc when she played the screen tests for The Devil in Love, a merry morality film in which Pia would try to get Satan to join the angels. If Ingrid's girl gets the part, she may have the most unlikely little devil in the world fall in love with her: Mickey Rooney.

In an elegant speech on "History as Literature" before the Society of American Historians in Washington, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, 72, told a wry tale. "Some years ago," he said, "a colleague in the State Department wrote papers in such beautiful prose that I found myself influenced toward conclusions which, when challenged, I could not justify. Protection against this siren proved simple. Another colleague rewrote the paper in telegraphese, leaving out most adjectives, inserting the word 'stop' for periods. This exorcised the magic. Too much art in the mixture and, in Sir John Seeley's contemptuous words, 'history fades into mere literature.' "

As one of his executors pointed out, "The question is no longer of any concern" to Master Showman Billy Rose, who died Feb. 10 of lobar pneumonia. But his two sisters are bitterly concerned, as they demonstrated in Manhattan's surrogate court by filing suit against Billy's temporary executors, charging, among other things, a failure to honor their request that he be memorialized with a $125,000 burial plot and monument. So poor Billy's body has been waiting in a cemetery receiving vault for eight weeks while family and lawyers haggle. Meantime, his fortune, variously estimated between $10 million and $30 million, has been temporarily reduced by roughly $600,000 because of a dip in the market price of A.T. & T. in which the Bantam Barnum, with 160,000 shares, was the biggest single stockholder.

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