After her well-guarded honeymoon on the isle of Skorpios, Jacqueline Onassis was looking forward to a quiet trip home to Manhattan and her children, with a stop along the way to see her sister, Lee Radziwill, in England. But when a lady has been queen of the headlines for so long, no place can really be a castle. London newsmen trailed Jackie to Lee's 49-acre estate, where a photographer snapped her standing alongside Dancer Rudolf Nureyev, bundled against the chill in a shapeless and unbecoming brown beret, blue jacket and grey trousers. And one woman's page writer waspishly suggested that in future Jackie reserve such headgear for her bath. Back in New York, Jackie passed the word that she wanted to be left strictly alone: it was the fifth anniversary of Jack Kennedy's assassination and the week Robert Kennedy would have been 43. But whenever she put her head outside her Fifth Avenue apartment, there were the Jackie watchers. One afternoon, after collecting young John at school, Jackie found herself and her Secret Service escort followed by several carloads of reporters. Finally, after a wild chase, the Secret Service man managed to slew his white convertible across the roadway, forcing the reporters to a screeching halt while Jackie's Cadillac disappeared.

In Manhattan last week to receive the National Institute of Social Sciences medal for "distinguished services to humanity," Charles Lindbergh spoke with concern about man's relation to his environment. "In the short period of time after intellect gained domination over instinct," said Lindy, "it has made man the most destructive creature upon earth." Man, Lindbergh complained, now suffers from an "inability to choose the better from the worse in fundamental values." Let us, he pleaded, "agree to preserve some of the natural environment that formed us. It holds the wisdom to which our tyranny of intellect must turn if we are to maintain the balanced qualities essential to survival."

This is a story that every art collector, big and little, dreams of. At the flea market in Paris, a West German businessman buys a painting of two sunbathing nudes for $40. The picture is grimy, so he scrubs it with a strong solvent. Behold, a blue shimmer of paint appears below the surface, and a professional restorer uncovers a remarkable signature--"Claude Monet, 1877." Now fully restored, the canvas appears to be one of Monet's largest impressionistic versions of Paris' Gare St. Lazare. But how did Monet ever get covered over? Easy: it was the vogue, since impressionists were held in such low regard in the later 1800s. Value of the picture on today's market: at least $250,000.

It was a test of literary might, pitting that cagey old French poet Louis Aragon against the Academic Goncourt. At issue was the coveted Prix Goncourt for literary achievement. Aragon was determined to keep the award from Bernard Clavel, author of nearly a dozen novels, who had already won the Grand Prix Litteraire de la Ville de Paris. Aragon had precedent on his side: no author has ever received these two literary prizes in one year. Aragon almost made it, but the tally was 6-5, Clavel. So Aragon rattled off a stormy letter of resignation. He railed against the "cannibalism that reigns among certain of our colleagues," and demanded that the letter be read at the awards luncheon. His colleagues merely announced his resignation--just before the pate.

About 100 wives stood anxiously in line at a Waikiki military club in Honolulu waiting for 162 servicemen on R & R leave from Viet Nam. A young woman, wearing a white miniskirt and red and white blouse, hugged her chubby blond-haired son and soothingly told him: "Daddy's coming. He'll come as soon as he can." Then, tired and wrinkled after the 13-hour flight, Airman Pat Nugent arrived, and Luci Nugent and little Lyn found themselves reunited after seven months. Lyn, who wore a military uniform--the gift of his maternal grandfather--greeted Daddy with a kiss and a wobbly salute. As for the itinerary of that five-day R & R, that's up to Pat. "He's the boss of our family," announced Luci, who had already done a week of sightseeing before his arrival.

Much of Broadway's sharpest wit never sees a stage. But the good lines live on, and a rich collection has now been recalled in a pair of theatrical autobiographies. In On Reflection, Actress Helen Hayes, 68, traces her private and professional life from childhood through to the present. In it she remembers the evening that Sir Laurence Olivier, after a particularly brilliant performance of Othello, agonized: "I know it was great, damn it, but I don't know how I did it, so how can I be sure I can do it again?" She wryly refers to a particular dinner with the acerbic drama critic Alexander Woollcott as "the Last Supper," recalls Victor Mature's reluctance to enter the arena with a tranquilized lion while shooting The

Robe: "Who the hell wants to be gummed to death?" And she will never forget the night she and her husband, Playwright Charles MacArthur, gave a party that concluded with Soprano Lucrezia Bori on the telephone singing a long-distance brindisi to Al Capone in Chicago. "When I look back over these years, a holiday mood possesses me," she writes. "Charlie and I had everything for a while . . . there were the children, the endless stream of intoxicating friends, energy and a never-ceasing supply of money. We lived it up, Charlie and I."

In Voices Offstage, Playwright Marc Connelly, 77, re-creates a surrealistic scene in which Robert Benchley and he stood in full evening dress on a balcony overlooking Fifth Avenue. Connelly shouted to the passers-by below, "Your new prince!" while Benchley, in a creaking German accent, assured them he would not treat them harshly. "You have all been so cute," concluded Benchley. "Next Saturday night I will permit fireworks and dancing in the streets." Connelly noted that "many appreciative listeners below us applauded vigorously," whereupon the two of them launched into a Bierstube song before ending the balcony scene. Connelly also tells of accepting Henry Ford's invitation to go for a drive one day in 1934 and sitting there in great amusement while the man who put America on wheels pushed pedals and punched buttons in a futile attempt to start his own car. "They're always changing the damn things!" Ford finally bellowed. Connelly gleefully remembers the time in the mid-'20s when William Butler Yeats, who had not set foot in a church for years, was mistaken for a minister aboard a steamer during a furious storm in the Irish Sea. A terrified young girl asked the poet to pray for her safety, whereupon Yeats threw back his head, shouted some lines from Milton into the raging wind, and "the storm stopped before he'd finished."

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