Surrounded by Italian news hens in Rome last week, Pat Nixon almost got her pasta caught in some really hot water. Italian food was her favorite, she said, and she made good spaghetti. "How long do you cook it?" asked a reporter. "A long time," said the First Lady. Noting the black looks at the thought of a White House full of pasty pasta, Pat made a remarkable recovery. "I cook my meat sauce a long time--I simmer it," she explained. "But the spaghetti: eight minutes." Smiles. Al dente!

One of the boutiques in the basement of the Tokyo Prince Hotel hired a hand last week whose references needed no checking. Mrs. Takako Shimazu, 31, the new "salon adviser," traces her lineage to no less a luminary than a sun; her father is Japan's Emperor Hirohito. The pretty ex-princess (who lost her title when she married a commoner) is not exactly a newcomer to the rat race. Ten years ago, she turned a fast yen as star of a deejay show on Tokyo radio called--not surprisingly--Princess Time.

Up to the door of Hickory Hill drove Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr. and her secretary, invited to a party for the new Robert F. Kennedy Fellows. POW! A water bomb, tossed by small Kennedys, sprayed them with disastrous accuracy. "I'm mortified--and on Coretta King of all people," clucked Mother Ethel Kennedy, as she helped to mop up. "They thought you were some other friends they were expecting." Then maternal pride asserted itself. "Their aim was really good, wasn't it?" Speaking of aim--and of the Kennedy waters--Lee Udall, the lively wife of R.F.K. Trustee Stewart Udall, suddenly blurted a confession about the celebrated dunking of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the Kennedy pool. "All these years, Ethel has been taking the rap for me," she said. "I'm the one who pushed Arthur into the pool. I was dancing by and he was standing there holding forth and looking so Arthurish, and something came over me. I just stuck out my arm and pushed him in and danced away. He never knew."

Britain's Royal Family continues to be as hippophile as ever. Princess Anne recently took time off from the family holiday at Balmoral to compete in a series of equestrian events. She trains so assiduously that friends are speculating that she has her eye on the Olympics. Mrs. Alan Oliver, who has instructed Anne since childhood, notes that "the competition is much tougher now that she is in the open class. But she is a very determined girl." Says Sir Michael Ansell, chairman of the British Show Jumping Association: "She would be most welcome in the international field."

At a Republican fund-raising dinner in Philadelphia, Shirley Temple Black, deputy chairman of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Conference on Human Development, made it perfectly clear that there is at least one human development that displeases her. "I don't care for Women's Lib," she said. "I prefer the strong arms of my husband around me."

Perhaps nothing is such big medicine in the fashion world as a picture of Jacqueline Onassis leaving a Manhattan restaurant in a new outfit. The mini was really in when she was photographed emerging from Lafayette one winter day in 1966 with her hemline inches above her knees. Last week it was La Cote Basque and inches above her ankles. Plus fa change . . .

England's actor laureate, Sir Laurence Olivier, 63, called a press conference in London to announce that he would be off the boards for at least a year. Said Olivier, who was operated on for cancer in 1967 and suffered thrombosis in one leg last August: "I just can't sustain a stage part. It feels like I've got 20 pounds more on one leg than the other, and during a long speech I get puffed. Anyway, I don't really enjoy acting very much any more."

As Germany's Onetime Heavyweight Champion Max Schmeling can testify, the man on the floor when the bell rings is not necessarily the long-run loser. Joe Louis, 56, who knocked Schmeling out in the first round of their championship bout in 1938, has been living in a Denver veterans mental hospital while his ex-wives and the Government haggle over what money he has left. By contrast, Schmeling--fit, rich and popular--celebrated his 65th birthday last week on his 25-acre estate near Hamburg with his actress-wife Anny Ondra, and was awarded West Germany's Federal Cross of Merit "in recognition of your special services for the nation and people."

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