His colleagues were taken aback when Dutch Foreign Minister Joseph Luns showed up at a Common Market conference in Luxembourg in his stockinged feet. Red socks at that. Luns explained that his scarlet chaussures were actually a pair of knitted slippers. For sore feet? "No, but these are more comfortable than shoes. It makes me slightly smaller," said the 6-ft. 6-in. diplomat, "and I can think better."

The citation accompanying his honorary degree from the University of Cincinnati ticked off a singular list of occupations: "Delivery boy, dancing teacher, shoe salesman, soda jerk and amateur prizefighter--which last activity may share responsibility for his famous profile." Cracked Bob Hope, L.H.D.: "Who wrote that? Crosby?"

Writing to an American friend, Britain's late poet laureate John Masefield recalled a lonely figure who was constantly hunched over a book at the British Museum reading room. "I often saw him," wrote Masefield, recalling 1907 and 1908, "and always said to myself, 'I wonder who that extraordinary man is,' for anyone must have seen that he was an extraordinary man, certain to make a mark on the world. Once, leaving, I saw that he was just behind me, so that I held the door open for him till he had passed. That was the nearest I ever got to him. I never sat next to Lenin. No such luck."

Crown Prince Akihito of Japan must have glowed with pride over his daughter Princess Nori as she was photographed at Togu Palace in Tokyo on her first birthday. With regal bearing, earnest mien and a firm grip on her free-form hobbyhorse, Nori looked ready to take the helm of the ship of state.

San Francisco's Mayor Joseph Alioto is suing Look magazine for $12.5 million because of its article linking him with the Mafia. That's no joke, but the federal courtroom dissolved in guffaws when the clerk read a deposition from Witness Barry Goldwater, who figured in the case because a key underworld figure claimed acquaintance with him. He had never heard of alleged Mafioso James Fratianno, said the Senator, but the man's photo looked familiar. "In fact, he looks a little like Agnew."

No idol of America's young, Lyndon Johnson nonetheless seems to have a sneaking sympathy for some of their modes. He has not yet taken to bell-bottoms or lovebeads, but he did show up at the Middleburg Hunt meet in Virginia wearing his curly silver-gray locks in what could only be described as a Woodstock bob.

In Argentina, the gossip mill churns with rumors that former Dictator Juan Peron is dying of cancer in Spain. In Madrid, El Lider insists that his doctors give him "at least 20 more working years." Looking chipper as ever despite surgery last month, Peron, 74, received newsmen with his 39-year-old wife at their mansion and announced over cognac: "We are going to go, Isabelita and I, for a week to the beach, to rest and to celebrate my funeral."

"They treated us like kings, czars, queens!" exclaimed Charlotte Ford Niarchos, entranced by the Russians' hospitality toward her father, Henry Ford II, and his family. "I came thin as a rail," said Henry's wife Christina. "They all thought I was sick. I gained five pounds, could hardly get into my clothes.

I was finally being fattened up like their own healthy women." However, even a billionaire's personal check is suspect in Russia, and Charlotte was forced to sign $4,000 worth of $50 traveler's checks to pay for 45 prime sable pelts.

In Italy to inspect World War I and

II military memorials, General Marie W. Clark was received by the Pope and recalled his first papal audience. On June 4, 1944, when his Fifth Army liberated Rome, Clark received a message from Pope Pius XII: "You are very busy, and so if you tell the monsignor where, I will come to see you." The general went to the Pontiff instead. "When I was about to go into the Pope's library," recalls Clark, now 74, "a secretary touched me on the shoulder and said 'Would you mind leaving your pistol with me? I assure you that you will not need it.' "

The boyhood friendship between Supreme Court Nominee Harry Blackmun and Chief Justice Warren Burger was put to the test in 1933, when Blackmun served as best man at Burger's wedding. While the couple honeymooned, the best man was entrusted with the groom's last two $20 bills, a nest egg in those Depression years. As Blackmun tells it, he soon received a telegram from Burger: "Wives are more expensive than I thought. Please send me the two 20s and another if you can spare it." Blackmun complied and saved the telegram. He gave it to the Burgers on their 25th anniversary.

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