CBS was worried. Christina Crawford, one of the stars of the soap opera The Secret Storm, had been rushed off to the hospital for emergency surgery. Who would fill in for her? Mother, of course, for Mother is Dowager Screen Queen Joan Crawford. Price was no problem; Joan was happy with union minimum. But how could a 60-year-old woman pass for the 27-year-old she was to play? No problem either. A session with the makeup man and a youthful hairdo, plus her own well-preserved looks, turned the trick for the four segments Joan will appear in. After that, the character will be written out of the show until Christina gets back to the set. Said Christina, eldest of Joan's four adopted children: "I couldn't exactly jump up and down in bed about it, but it was fantastic she would care that much."

There was standing room only in the National Film Theater when London's cinema fans turned out en masse to hear nouvelle vague Director Jean-Luc Godard deliver a lecture on movie making. But the appointed hour came and went with no sign of the speaker. Finally, the disappointed audience was read a telegram from the elusive Godard: "If I am not there, take anyone in the street, the poorest if possible, give him my -L- 100 lecture fee, and talk with him of images and sound, and you will learn from him much more than from me because it is the poor people who are really inventing the language. Yours anonymously, Godard."

Who but a lawyer would ever try to make a case for the Mafia? Luigi Barzini, for one. The Mafia "gives the Sicilians some sort of order in a country governed by foreign oppressors," said the Italian author-journalist in a discussion with students at Los Angeles' Occidental College. "The Mafia man uses the family and will not do degenerate things--he'll have nothing to do with heroin or prostitution." All of which leads Barzini to believe that Lucky Luciano, deported from the U.S. in 1946 as an undesirable alien who dabbled in dames, was never really a Mafia man. "When I read in American papers that Luciano masterminded a drug ring and brothels, I know he is not Mafia." In fact, noted Barzini with some pride, "the Mafia swindled him out of mil lions of lire."

"Jackie Onassis. Jackie Onassis," mused Columnist Herb Caen in the San Francisco Chronicle. "It sounds funny, but we got used to Senator George Murphy and Governor Ronald Reagan." For a week now, the former Jacqueline Kennedy had been Mrs. Aristotle Onassis, and the world and Herb Caen were beginning to get used to it. Still, though the initial stir of excitement had receded, there was no shortage of comment, much of it venomous.

At a party celebrating the 75th anniversary of Maxim's in Paris, Diva Maria Callas was reported to have remarked: "She did well, Jacqueline, to give a grandfather to her children." A Boston matron icily charged that "Jackie has made the Gabor sisters look like ladies." A few commentators were still disproportionately distressed, like the Italian columnist for L'Espresso who painted Onassis as "this grizzled satrap, with his liver-colored skin, thick hair, fleshy nose, the wide horsy grin, who buys an island and then has it removed from all the maps to prevent the landing of castaways." It was left to Novelist Gore Vidal, no admirer of the Kennedys, to deliver the week's most understated attack on the marriage: "I can only give you two words: Highly suitable."

Aristotle Onassis, who is vain about his public image, came in for a great deal of vitriol. But Hughes Rudd, commenting on CBS News' 60 Minutes, defended him. "The question of his being a Greek had nothing to do with it at all, of course: Prince Philip is actually of Greek descent, but as London cabbies are fond of saying, 'He's not one of your restaurant Greeks.' Well, neither is Mr. Onassis one of your restaurant Greeks. He's one of your shipping-millionaire Greeks, and he sounds a lot more fun than Prince Philip." In Paris, Liz Taylor agreed. "Have you ever met him?" she challenged critics of the match. "Well, then stop all this nonsense. He is the most charming, the most appealing, the kindest man around. He is one of the most considerate people I know."

Of course, he is even richer than he is considerate. Some observers suggested, neither unkindly nor jokingly, that even a woman as comfortably fixed as Jackie Kennedy might more easily continue to live in her accustomed style as the wife of one of the world's richest men. Though Jackie obviously opted out of U.S. politics by her marriage to Onassis, the Kennedy name refused to leave the chapel when the wedding vows were made; her two children will continue to bear John Kennedy's name. Said a foreign ambassador in Athens: "I am convinced that she married him to secure the financing of John-John's presidential campaign in 1983."

The ceremony that joined the pair was almost self-consciously modest. Rain, considered a blessing by the Greeks, had descended like a grey benediction across the Onassis-owned island of Skorpios. In the tiny chapel, Jackie stood quietly--almost in a daze--in her beige chiffon-and-lace dress, Ari in his dark blue business suit. John and Car oline, each carrying a single tall white candle, flanked them. As Archimandrite Polykarpos Athanassion intoned the solemn Greek of the nuptial liturgy, Jackie and Ari exchanged rings and wreaths of lemon blossoms, and drank wine from a single chalice. Then the priest led them round a table three times in the ritual dance of Isaiah. Traditionally in the dance, one of the newlyweds steps on his (or her) partner's foot to signify who will command in the marriage. None of the 25 guests admitted seeing such one-foot-upmanship.

Afternoon modesty inevitably yielded to evening pomp. First came the semiofficial merrymaking, amid champagne toasts, flowers and bouzoukis, on the afterdeck of the Onassis yacht Christina. Later, reported the Washington Post's Maxine Cheshire, came the real show: Ari's wedding gift to Jackie. Already, a Chicago newsman had tendered a few suggestions for those who might not know what to give a couple who had everything: the Taj Mahal, the Boston Pops, the S.S. Queen Elizabeth II, the De Beers diamond mines, the New York Stock Exchange--or the Burtons. Onassis' actual gift to Jackie was nearly as awesome. When she came into the yacht's lounge for the wedding dinner, Jackie was wearing it: on her left hand, a ring with a huge ruby surrounded by large diamonds; on her ears, matching ruby-and-diamond earrings. Caroline broke the stunned silence: "Mummy, Mummy, Mummy! They're so pretty. You're so pretty." Laughing, Jackie removed the ring to let Caroline play with it. The jewels reportedly cost Onassis $1.2 million.

Not everything was so impressively heart-shaped for the newlyweds. The shrill criticism of their marriage finally provoked a response from Jackie's old friend and spiritual adviser, Richard Cardinal Gushing of Boston. In the anguished days of the assassination five years ago, it was Cushing's cracked, gravel-voiced prayer for "dear Jack" that suffused the austere ritual of J.F.K.'s re quiem with a warm humanity. Last week, sounding another note of humanity, the cardinal told a Boston audience that the only way to view Jackie's marriage was with charity. "I turn on the radio and all I hear are people knocking her head off," he said. He pleaded for "love, mutual respect and esteem." What he got in response was a mountain of mail so overwhelmingly critical that he decided to resign by the end of the year (see RELIGION). The Vatican's canon lawyers found themselves unable to share Cushing's generous view of the marriage. By marrying Onassis, they said, the woman who has met the Pope in at least five private audiences had cut herself off from Roman Catholic sac raments and had become, at least technically, a "public sinner."

While Cardinal Cushing's mail may have been malicious, her contemporaries' second thoughts about Jackie's wedding gradually became kinder--or at least more understanding. Columnist Doris Lilly, thinking aloud on CBS-TV, suggested that there might be practical reasons for the renewed charity among the jet set. "The beautiful people see the marriage more like an announcement of a marvelous new free airline, a free yacht and a string of dazzling houses suddenly put at their disposal," she explained. "Jackie isn't so bad after all, they say. Ari isn't bad either. I know Ari. He's the bee's knees."

Of course, it became a popular pastime to analyze Jackie and her motives. A couturier friend attributed Jackie's marriage to "a desire to escape the Kennedy clan, which is really, believe me, a vault of lead. She did it bravely, breaking with this marriage every alliance with the past. And why not? The present, the life she and the children had to face daily, was unlivable for a human being--rushing, hiding, constantly representing someone or something." As to the rather indelicate question of whether Jackie intended to have chil dren by Onassis, speculators could only grasp at an alleged interview in the Greek daily, Nea Politia. Reporter: "Do you intend to have children?" Jackie: "I hope and wish it. It's a wonderful thing to have children."

The week of the wedding, a German paper had headlined that "America has lost a saint." Gradually, both Americans and Europeans began to realize that the saint, or heroine, had been of their own making. "They wanted her to be a widow forever," said Anthropologist Margaret Mead. "There is no conceivable way for her to satisfy them. That's one of the drawbacks of being put in a regal position." Some of the heroine-worshipers were still taking it -hard. Los Angeles Financier Bart Lytton, a longtime Kennedy supporter, turned his photo of Jackie upside down on the wall, and planned to "leave her that way for a while longer."

But Giulietta Masina, Italian actress and wife of Film Director Federico Fellini, was more quickly generous in Turin's La Stampa. "Myths, when they are human, are fatally subject to wear and tear, disparities, and loneliness," she wrote. "Why marvel if a woman at a certain point tears off all the veils that cover her like a monument--a 39year-old monument, still beautiful, extremely alive, obligated to a role that does not belong to her? I say that if she wishes to begin all over again, it is right that she do it."

What still bothered some critics more than anything else was that Aristotle Onassis seemed to be on the verge of becoming the public partner of a regime that does not exactly mirror the ideals of his wife's first husband. Last week Onassis interrupted the honeymoon long enough to confer for five hours with Greek Premier George Papadopoulos, the leader of the military junta, about his plans to invest up to $400 million in Greece. The Onassis investment package includes several tourist developments, an underground air terminal in Athens and an aluminum factory designed to take advantage of Greece's rich bauxite deposits. To make such an undertaking economically feasible, Onassis needs permission to import, duty-free, fuel for the factory's power plant. The Greek government is reportedly asking in return that he transfer some of his 100 ships--most of which now sail under the Liberian flag of convenience--to Greek registry.

Beyond this first investment package, Ari has other plans--perhaps an oil concession, or shipyards in the Gulf of Corinth. The newlyweds are expected to spend much of each year in New York City and aboard the Christina, but Ari obviously will still be spending a good deal of time in Greece. And Jackie will remain what she became last week by virtue of her marriage to the lord of Skorpios--queen of one of Europe's last truly moneyed courts, even if it is an untitled one.

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