The ski pros call him "Tiger," and every day for a week he went up the mountain after lunch to shoot "the Slot," one of the toughest runs at Snow-mass-at-Aspen. "Simply magnificent," gloated retired Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, 51, a ski nut who has been using the Aspen ski slopes to unwind after seven crushing years in Washington. In his new job as president of the World Bank, the Tiger will be able to spend about half the year at his chalet in Snowmass, but last week's outing may prove unsurpassable. "This has been a beautiful week," said McNamara. "Resting, relaxing, stimulating and exciting. I don't know when I have had a better string of days."

U.S. troop commitments to Viet Nam are being escalated by at least two. Marine Captain Charles Robb, 28, has been scheduled all along to ship out to Viet Nam, and his orders now call for him to leave at the end of the month. But Pat Nugent, 24, is a surprise addition to the fighting forces. At his own request, Airman First Class Nugent has been transferred from a Texas Air National Guard unit to the Washington-based 113th Tactical Fighter Wing. He reports for active duty next week and expects to go to Viet Nam.

Her broken toe sidelined Vanessa Redgrave for three weeks from the filming of her movie about Isadora Duncan, but that was no reason to drop out of character. While recuperating, Vanessa accepted an invitation to make her singing debut on French television. Critics raved about her voice, but it was her appearance that dazzled most people. Barefoot and as Duncanesque as ever, she looked like a flowing fountain of purple and mauve chiffon--and only the stagehands could see that her hands were trembling with nervousness through the whole ordeal.

America's longshoremen have long staged their own reprisals against enemies foreign and domestic, as in their refusal in 1964 to load U.S. wheat onto Russian-bound freighters. Now Dr. Benjamin Specie, 64, baby doctor and Viet Nam dissenter, has felt the fury of their wrath. Dock workers in Manhattan disdained to haul Spock's new 35-ft. ketch Carapace aboard the freighter Atlantic Clipper, headed for the Virgin Islands, where Spock has a winter home. Carapace's builders announced that they would sail the boat to the Caribbean themselves.

A face from the past popped briefly into view as Carole Tregoff, 30, sentenced to life imprisonment seven years ago for the murder of her lover's wife, Barbara Jean Finch, was denied parole in California in her first hearing after becoming eligible. Dr. R. Bernard Finch, also serving a life term, gets his first hearing next month, and it is thought likely that he will get the same answer. Next time might be different. Carole can try again in 14 months, said the parole board chairman, and she will "in all likelihood" be released.

Pablo Picasso is highly protective of his privacy and his past, but out of respect for the last wishes of his lifelong friend and secretary, Jaime Sabartes, who died last month in Paris, Picasso has agreed to turn over 250 of his own letters to Sabartes to the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. The letters, reaching back over almost the whole of their 69-year friendship, are reputed to speak uninhibitedly of art and sex, politics and business transactions. It will be a while before anyone knows for sure, though. This week a special commission will count the letters, then on Picasso's orders seal them unread in a chest in the museum for 50 years.

A routine police check on a loiterer in Stamford, Conn., turned up a saddening catch: Jack R. Robinson Jr., 21, son of the former Brooklyn Dodger star who broke the color line in baseball and went on to a distinguished career as a businessman and as Governor Nelson Rockefeller's assistant for community affairs. Young Jack, an unemployed high school dropout and Army veteran, was carrying marijuana, heroin, and a loaded .22 when he was picked up. "I thought my family was so secure that we wouldn't have to worry," said his stunned father. "So I went running around everywhere else. I had more effect on other people's kids than I had on my own."

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ballyhooed meditational retreat in Rishikesh has more dropouts than jump school in the paratroops. Latest to blow the joint is Mia Farrow, 23, who decamped halfway through her planned three-month stay. Mia swept into London airport in a long, Eastern, flower-spattered dress, carrying a "secret box" and proclaiming herself "better equipped to face my problems." As if to prove it, she flew on to New York and Miami to face her biggest problem, estranged Hubby Frank Sinatra.

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