It's kind of a game, see. You've already bought a $1,000,000 de Havilland private jetliner and a $600,000 yacht and a $305,000 diamond, and you" bank account shows more zeroes than a no-hitter. So what do you buy next? A whirlybird, that's what. The $500,000 French-made Alouette helicopter made a cute little present from Liz Taylor to Hubby Richard Burton. Then they hustled on up to Sotheby's in London, where Dickie knocked down a Picasso for $21,600 and Liz wigwagged the winning $120,000 bid for a nice old Monet. And then . . .

After 12 weeks of fusing 750-lb. bombs in Cam Ranh Bay, Airman First Class Patrick J. Nugent, 24, has volunteered for still more hazardous duty. Now in the first stages of training as a loadmaster for C-123 transport planes, President Johnson's younger son-in-law will eventually be charged with loading and dumping out supplies to troops in the field--an assignment that may take him into the thick of combat.

The odd melodrama sounded like an excerpt from one of Tennessee Wiliams' own plays. "I am in a net of con men," read the hastily scrawled letter the playwright had written to his brother Dakin. "If anything of a violent nature happens to me, it will not be a case of suicide, as it would be made to appear." That sounded ominous, and everybody grew more worried when Williams disappeared from his Manhattan apartment. Reporters finally located him last week at his house in Key West, refusing to talk about anything. "He must have had a bad scare," judged Dakin. Tennessee's mother, Mrs. Edwina Williams, 86, took the whole thing with a shrug: "My son has done such things before."

He was the first Beatle to marry, fathered the first Beatle baby, and now an older John Lennon, 27, is meditating about the first Beatle divorce. After six years of marriage and one son, John has split with Wife Cynthia, 27, and is all about London with Japanese-born avant-garde artist Yoko Ono, 34. "I love Yoko," said John. Yet there's a hang-up--she's still hitched to U.S. Film Director Anthony Cox. Small matter. "I don't think that marriage is the end product of love," explained John.

Even 250 years ago, it was no great shakes as a gift: 32 books and a few bolts of cloth from a governor of Britain's East India Co. to a struggling American college known as the Connecticut Collegiate School. Yet the colonists so deeply appreciated it that they changed the school's name to honor the donor. And now, having expanded over the years, the present university last week sent 150 alumni, professors and students led by President Kingman Brewster all the way to Wrexham, Wales, to unveil a plaque commemorating the gift made by Elihu Yale.

His men knew him as a soft-spoken commander with a quick smile. Yet he was also a tough-minded officer who survived the Bataan death march of 1942, won the Distinguished Service Cross for "extraordinary heroism" in Korea, and guided the massive logistical buildup in Viet Nam. And now General Harold Keith Johnson, 56, 24th Army Chief of Staff, has called an end to a brilliant, 35-year career. Said President Johnson as he pinned an oakleaf cluster on Johnson's Distinguished Service Medal: "The Army is a stronger and more responsible and much more humane service because Johnny Johnson was its leader."

Gathering for what they styled a World Poetry Conference in Stony Brook, L.I., Beat Bard Allen Ginsberg, and 35 fellow troubadours resolved, among others, that: "Police state military tyranny sexual repression and laws against expansion of consciousness by joyful dance and natural herbs threaten evolution of the race . . . Man's usurpation over nature is an egotism that will destroy human as well as whale kingdoms . . . The new consciousness articulated by longhair revolutionary student generations begins fulfillment of humane anarchy . . . Academies should return to wisdom study in tree groves rather than robot study in plastic cells--Bless the Universe!"

There was an aura of headline charm about Miami Beach Boy Jack ("Murph the Surf") Murphy, 35, when he and his pals hit the big type in 1964 for climbing into New York's Museum of Natural History and stealing its 563-carat Star of India sapphire. Then the story got ugly. A hotel clerk claimed that Murphy had pistol-whipped him; Actress Eva Gabor said he had done the same to her; his 22-year-old mistress committed suicide. Then Miami police charged him and a crony with the murder of two secretaries who had disappeared from a Los Angeles brokerage office with $448,732 in securities. Last week, after listening to medical experts label Murph "paranoid" and "schizophrenic," a Miami judge declared him unfit to stand trial and committed him to a state mental hospital.

The audience at Peking's Opera was settling in for an evening of song accompanied by traditional lutes and cymbals. Then a gasp swept the hall. The only instrument in view was a piano-- that capitalist contraption condemned by Red Guards and smashed into kindling wherever it was found. The mystery was solved when Chiang Ching, 53, Mao Tse-tung's wife and custodian of the Cultural Revolution, announced that the old 88 had been deemed "a new type of proletarian art." Besides, she's been studying it for two years. Wrote the Peking press: "Another flower of proletarian revolutionary art shining with the brilliance of Mao Tse-tung's thought."

At first he modestly tried to beg off, claiming urgent business in Paris. "But tennis is like alcohol once it gets in your bloodstream," said Sargent Shriver, 52, U.S. Ambassador to France, and there he was at Wimbledon competing in the Veterans' Gentlemen's Doubles. Bounding nimbly across the court, stretching for volleys, scrambling for lobs, Shriver and Partner Robert Kelleher, president of the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association, easily defeated their first-round opponents 6-2, 6-0. Next day, though, they were paired against Jaroslav Drobny and A. V. Martini, a couple of old hands at the game. "They really gave us a shellacking," wheezed Sarge. "But it was terrific!"

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