"It's a wonderful place to get away from it all," said Lady Bird Johnson. How she knew was a mystery. Accompanied by a 24-raft flotilla of 60 newsmen, her own twelve-man entourage, and Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, she floated (with paddle) down eleven miles of the shallow Rio Grande in Texas' Big Bend National Park to dramatize her beautify-and see-the-U.S.A. campaigns. Everything came off more or less swimmingly as the ladybird watchers went over the side in search of closeups or simply fell off, like the stretch-pantsed newswoman who jammed her parasol at a ranger's eye as she went under. But the press got their waterlogged copy out, which was the whole idea anyway. As the White House's Bill Moyers cracked: "The New York Times has a picture on Page One --Mrs. Johnson looks like Tom Mix, and Secretary Udall looks like Tonto."

He has escaped death five times (falling off a cliff, a severe case of typhoid, a plane crash, two assassination attempts), and the experiences have brought Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlevi a good deal closer to Allah, says a friend. In any case, the Shah does not like Gamal Abdel Nasser's frequent attacks calling him an infidel. So to emphasize his pride in being a good Moslem, the Iranian ruler ordered the printing of a new edition of the Koran at his own expense ($250,000 so far). Using a previously unreproduced 16th century version by Calligrapher Ahmed Neirizi, 40 experts spent a year re-checking every word; then the Shah announced that the first 3,000 copies of the ornately beautiful manuscript were ready and that a copy would be sent to just about every Moslem ruler, except Nasser.

Britain's bonny Prince Andrew, 6, last week took delivery on a little number from Aston-Martin. It does 6 m.p.h. flat out and can stop on a lollipop. The automaker's $11,000 gift is a scaled-down model of that piece of incredibilia James Bond drove in Goldfinger. Tooling around the playgrounds, Andrew can be in constant contact by two-way radio with headquarters at either Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace. There is also a radar warning system with a three-mile radius, a protective bulletproof shield, and the punch of a button can send up a giant smoke screen or fire streams of water from the two rear reflectors. So cool it, nanny.

In 1958, when the broken body of Benito Mussolini was finally returned to his widow, Donna Rachele, the brain was missing. Though most of it was given to her a year later by an Italian laboratory, a small piece, about a square centimeter in size, had been taken to Washington for medical study. Last week Donna Rachele told how those last remains were returned. A messenger from the U.S. State Department turned up one day recently with what he said was "something very important." Then he gave her five tiny vials, each containing a bit of tissue, plus a bigger piece of whitish brain in a transparent envelope. The name on the envelope was misspelled MUSSOLINNI.

"On a gamble," he flew to Paris in 1946 and asked Picasso if he could show some of the great man's paintings in his gallery. Like much else that Sam Kootz did, the gamble turned out to be a success. Though he had exhibited virtually nothing since the start of the Nazi occupation of Paris, Picasso agreed; Kootz returned to New York with nine paintings. And his Kootz Gallery soon became the headquarters of the abstract-expressionist school, showing such painters as Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Now, "after 21 years of cultivating other people's talent, I've decided it was time to cultivate my own," he said last week. And with that, Kootz, 67, closed his historic gallery and started to work on a book about his experiences in the art world.

The 70 music professors led by Princeton's Arthur Mendel wrote a letter to the President. "We are compelled to voice our shocked disappointment that among all 26 members of the National Council on the Humanities, the only musician is one whose distinctions are exclusively in the commercial world of light entertainment." What they meant was that Meredith Willson, 63, was a missed minim who didn't belong on the council. The composer-lyricist of The Music Man replied that he had once played flute under Toscanini, and "the fact that I happen to make money at what I happen to do has no bearing on my qualifications."

In Monaco the bands must certainly be up on the Anniversary Waltz or whatever it is they play to commemorate the passing of time. It is Monte Carlo's centennial. As if that were not enough to keep Prince Rainier, 42, and his Grace, 36, busy, next week will make ten years since the movie queen turned princess. The imminent occasion prompted an official family portrait, which was taken none too soon, for all three children--Prince Albert, 8, Princess Caroline, 9, and Princess Stephanie, 14 months--were coming down with whooping cough. And there is still another milepost to mark--in July, when Rainier's beard will be one year old.

Who is the highest-paid performer in the whole wide world? "I am," said Barbra Streisand. "I'm paid more. I get as much for me, one person, as all four of the Beatles." She then announced that she is planning a concert tour this fall of 20 U.S. cities in five weeks and will get $50,000 per concert, or $1,000,000 for the whole effort. "That's as much as Elizabeth Taylor receives, but she has to spend three to five months on a picture to make it." As for Frank Sinatra, he may have averaged as much per concert on his tour last year but, Streisand's agents point out, he had to pay his band and she does not. So maybe she really is the highest-paid performer in the whole wide world.

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