She hadn't exactly been pounding the sidewalks for weeks with Help Wanted pages in her hand, but still, Lynda Bird Johnson, 22, did take her time before signing on with McCall's magazine as a part-time consultant and writer specializing in the affairs of youth. She had other thoughts on her mind last week in Manhattan, however, where she looked on fondly as Actor George Hamilton, 27, played a few location scenes for a film called Jack of Diamonds. As George flew off to Europe for more filming, Hollywood Gossip Sheilah Graham figured the current romantic odds: "I have $10 that says yes. She quite obviously adores him. At the other end of the bet is his pressagent, who is wagering $100 that the marriage will not come off."

As a housewife and mother of three, Mrs. Charles Black, 38, was considerably shocked when she had a look at Swedish Director Mai Zetterling's Night Games, a morbid tale featuring incest, masturbation, sodomy and more. "Pornography for profit," said Mrs. Black, who used to know something about movies--and profit--when she was Shirley Temple. And so, when her fellow members of the board of directors of the San Francisco Film Festival insisted that Night Games remain on the schedule for showing later this month, Shirley resigned from the board and the festival. "I'm not a censor," she said. "But I have a right to my opinion."

Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney, 67, so admired the artist's primitive entitled Snow Bird that he snapped it up for $200 at the exhibition in Manhattan's Wally F. Galleries. Artist Marylou Whitney returned the compliment, laying out $300 for Belted Kingfisher, one of Sonny's nature studies. Luckily, a swarm of other customers also turned up at the champagne party opening the show to pay a total of $8,825 for the 37 works that Mr. and Mrs. Whitney had painted to benefit the Edward R. Murrow Memorial Fund of Manhattan's Overseas Press Club Foundation. In fact, for amateurs, the Whitneys were making fairly professional progress in their artistic careers. The Syracuse Art Museum recently selected one of his and one of hers for its permanent collection.

"I can't cook," she once said proudly. "I don't know how to wash. I have never sewn a stocking. My husband will have to give me a houseful of servants if he wants a hot dinner and clean clothes now and then." Most women who talked like that would drive their husbands to uxoricide, but fortunately, Italian Actress Rosanna Schiaffino, 26, married a well-heeled Roman producer who can afford to have someone else wash his shirts. Besides, Rosanna has other advantages, such as resembling Gina Lollobrigida and going out to earn her own stocking money. Last week the hard-working girl flew into New York to flack prettily for her film Arrivederci, Baby!--a comedy in which she plays a rich girl whose husband is trying to kill her.

Having slaughtered friends and relations at whim before his own assassination in A.D. 96, the Emperor Domitian was hardly the sort to make a girl look dreamy. Still, his stone head at the Swiss Antique Dealers' Fair in Berne did bear a thatchy resemblance to French Movie Actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, 33, and Actress Ursula Andress, 30, momentarily struck a rapt pose during a visit to her home town. In Paris, Jean-Paul's wife of 14 years, Elodie, has been less enchanted ever since Ursula and her husband finished Up to His Ears months ago and took off together for an idyllic holiday in Tahiti. Elodie has filed for divorce. Now friends say, "Belmondo will marry Ursula at once if she asks him."

Still recovering from an operation in August to remove a tumor from his vocal cords, California's Senator George Murphy, 64, asked the Senate's consent to violate its rules by speaking through a microphone and portable amplifier. When Murphy had finished a brief speech on the antipoverty program, New York's Senator Jacob Javits was so impressed with the tones that he rose in the hush of the chamber to amplify his longstanding suggestion that microphones be installed for all the Senators, who have traditionally enjoyed the advantages and disadvantages of not being able to hear one another speak very clearly. Murphy immediately raised his mike and broadcast: "I should like to be a co-sponsor on such a measure."

Even though Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, 67, has always preferred mountain climbing to social climbing, the annual "Green Book," Washington's suede-bound registry of capital society, had listed his name for 29 years as an acceptable chap to invite to a party. Then last summer, having divorced his third wife, a lass of 26, His Honor married Oregon College Student Cathleen Heffernan, 23. Bad form, ruled Green Book Publisher Carolyn Hagner Shaw, banishing the Justice from this year's Social List of Washington. The snub hardly mattered to crusty Douglas, but his bride said a little sadly: "He's been getting criticism for a long time. I'm a newcomer to it." Another newcomer, Hostess Barbara Howar, 31, full-time swinger and onetime unofficial consultant to Luci and Lynda Bird --before she was blackballed by the White House for discussing her Johnson friendship too freely--was also frozen out of the Green Book. She gave the frost right back. "That," she sniffed, "is kind of like being asked to leave Nedick's."

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