Things were purring along on the good ship Pussycat as it headed south out of San Francisco down the coast to San Diego. Aboard the 65-ft. yacht was Comedian Jerry Lewis, making his first real cruise on his spanking new toy. There was crystal in the galley, mahogany paneling everywhere, and a pair of deck chairs were tastefully stenciled "Mr. Captain" and "Mrs. Captain." Suddenly the tub sprang a leak, and pretty soon Pussycat was drifting helplessly. At last, when the table floated across the dining room, Mr. Captain and crew abandoned ship and made it to the beach, where they watched $350,000 worth of status break up in the surf.

Because of the light--the shattering clarity that had seduced so many artists--Painter Marc Chagall in 1950 left Paris to live on the Riviera. Last week Chagall, now 79, said merci to the land of azure waters with a $2,000,000 gift: 17 major oils and 50 gouaches and watercolors, representing much of his last twelve years' work, which will be housed in a government-financed Chagall museum in Nice. When it is completed in 1968, the memorial will take its place beside the Riviera's three other museums dedicated to modern masters: Picasso's in Antibes, Leger's in Biot and Matisse's, also in Nice.

"They don't care anything about Latin girls," cried Miss Ecuador before the judging. "The European girls get better food, and they are the ones who are photographed," sobbed Miss Argentina. Sure enough, Miss Sweden, Margareta Arvidsson, 18, was crowned Miss Universe in Miami. No pleasing some people--she wept too. "I don't want it," she groaned. "Now I won't be able to go anywhere without a chaperone." By next morning the sea captain's daughter had recovered. Said she: "I don't remember anything about last night."

Not much escaped the memento seekers when Manhattan's old Metropolitan Opera House closed down last April. Opera buffs pried off seat numbers, and ripped down damask wall coverings. Not to be outdone, RCA Victor carted away (after paying $10,000) the gold brocade curtain and announced that it would cut the drapery into 45,000 patches and include one in each copy of a souvenir-record album called Opening Nights at the Metropolitan. Of course, the curtain did shrink some in the cleaning, but there was enough to go around as Soprano Leontyne Price scissored off the first snippet for publicity's sake. Then she hurried back to rehearsals at the new Met, where she will star opening night as Cleopatra in an opera written for her by Composer Samuel Barber.

It turned out to be something of a kook's tour. First there was that midnight wedding in Las Vegas with the bride in a short shrift of a shift and the groom in the sockless sports outfit he happened to have on when they jetted out of Paris. Then Brigitte Bardot, 31, and her new, third husband, Gunter Sachs, 33, roared off to Hollywood for a Mad Hatter nuptial dinner, with Danny Kaye personally whipping up his special seven-course Chinese feed for the couple. Next morning, on they zoomed to Tahiti for a get-away-from-everything idyl--only to find half the French press corps camped in Papeete for the latest French A-bomb tests. So now the honeymooners chartered a yacht and sailed away among the islands, feasting on roast pig and gazing at the mushroom clouds.

The bronze bust rests in a grove of mountain alder and aspen, looking out over a valley of sagebrush and meandering brooks. It is a fitting spot for a monument to Ernest Hemingway--the area around Sun Valley, Idaho, where he spent the last three years of his life. The dedication came on what would have been the author's 67th birthday, and 300 friends gathered with his widow Mary and son Jack to pay their respects. "I looked around at all the pomp and circumstance," said Jack after the speeches, "and then I saw a fruit jar at the base of the statue filled with wild flowers. That really got to me. Papa would have liked that."

As every kid in the U.S. knows, Jesse James met an untimely end with a bullet in the back fired by "that dirty little coward," Bob Ford. In Thailand, though, the story goes a bit differently. Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn used to watch a Thai translation of TV's Legend of Jesse James every Saturday night, along with 100,000 other fans. Then it got to bothering him to see a bad guy like Jesse ride off into the sunset unpunished at the end of each episode. "The series might mislead Thai youth into thinking wrong is right," the Prime Minister announced, and so he knocked poor Jesse right off the air--without even firing a shot.

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