No one doubts his strong right arm, but was that a softball Leopold Stokowski, 86, hefted in Manhattan's Central Park? It was. Stokie, conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, is an old hand at the game. He patiently drilled his musicians for the day when he could talk his neighbors, the New York Philharmonic, into a friendly match. So there he was zinging in the first ball while Umpire Skitch Henderson scrutinized his style. Even though the Philharmonic had a ringer in sometime triangle player George Plimpton, Stokowski's sluggers drummed out a 15-10 victory. "They're younger," allowed a Philharmonic musician. Not so, snapped the maestro: "When we play a game, we aim to win."

He may be deep in debt (he owes $280,000 to his lawyers) and nearing the final round of his losing two-year bout with the U.S. Selective Service System; yet Muhammad Ali, 25, once known as Cassius Marcellus Clay, still has that golden gift of gab. His latest bit of doggerel, recited on college campuses while speaking for the cause of the Black Muslims, recounts the long journey in store for Joe Frazier, current pretender to the heavyweight crown, if ever they should fight:

The referee wears a worried frown Cause he can't start counting 'til

Frazier comes down.

Who would have thought when they

came to the fight They'd witness the flight Of the first colored satellite?

The Hudson River breeze was so fresh that for a moment it looked as if Lady Bird Johnson, 55, and Happy Rockefeller, 41, were trying out hippie hairstyles. Lady Bird had come to New

York Harbor to open an exhibit for the projected American Museum of Immigration on Liberty Island. Boarding one of Manhattan's sightseeing boats, she sailed up to dock at 42nd Street, where Happy and Nelson were piped aboard to pay their respects. The Rockefellers scrambled ashore afterward, but the First Lady was just feeling her sea legs, and she chugged on up the Hudson for two days of sightseeing in her "Discover America" campaign.

"Ladies and gentlemen," announced the auctioneer at Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries, "we now come to the Krupp diamond"--a flawless, 33.19-carat blue-white stone once given by German Industrialist Baron Alfried Krupp to his wife Vera, and considered one of the world's great gems. $100,000, commenced the auctioneer, and up shot the price. $150,000 . . . $175,000 . . . $225,000. At $300,000, even Jeweler Harry Winston, who had long coveted the stone, was forced to drop out. Winning bid: $305,000. The determined purchaser: Richard Burton, who sent his agents to snap it up for Wife Elizabeth Taylor because he fancies slipping a little love token on her finger now and again. Explained Burton's secretary: "Mr. Burton doesn't give presents for a special occasion. He gives presents because he likes giving them." Said Richard: "My little girl is ecstatically happy about getting it."

The thunder of hooves and the roar of the crowd have been stilled at Long Island's famed Belmont Park since 1963, when the 58-year-old grandstand was declared unsafe. A $30 million rebuilding program (including a quarter-mile-long grandstand, a new clubhouse and 908 mutuel windows) is now completed, and the owners have been sorting through the archives for memorabilia to mark Belmont's reopening with this week's Carter Handicap. And what should turn up but a 1939 snapshot of a ten-year-old miss named Jackie Bouvier, now Jacqueline Kennedy, prettily perched on a rail at Belmont.

Soprano Anna Moffo, 32, had never seemed in more crystalline voice, and drew bravo after bravo during Verdi's La Traviata at West Berlin's Deutsche Oper. Then, as Tenor Renato Cioni burst into a rousing drinking song, the Pennsylvania-born beauty collapsed in a dead faint onstage before the horrified crowd. Doctors soon brought her round, but announced sadly that Anna, childless in ten years of marriage to Italian Producer Mario Lanfranchi, had suffered a miscarriage. Said Anna: "I am terribly depressed because I wanted a baby more than anything else."

"It's great," exclaimed Painter Jamie Wyeth, 21, Andrew's son. "It's tremendous," said Cartoonist Al Capp, 58. "It's marvelous," cooed Actress Bette Davis, 60. "I don't know how we'll ever pick a winner." And quite a problem it was for judges at a masquerade bash thrown at Manhattan's Cheetah discotheque in aid of Maine's Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Some 700 of the town's In-folk got themselves up as spacemen, talking lobsters, Raggedy Anns, Quaker Oats boxes, even as a briefcase carrying a man. But the real hit was Sculptress Marisol, 38, who applied her talents to painting cubist patterns on the face of one of the ladies present. "It's not so hard," she laughed. "It's just like painting the sculptures." Said her living sculpture, behind a mask of red and purple: "Now I've got the highest-priced make-up artist in town."

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