Twice a Nobel prizewinner (chemistry 1954, peace 1962), California Biochemist Linus Pauling has claimed a breakthrough in treatment of the common cold. His nonsecret: vitamin C, which was isolated in 1928. The vitamin--also called ascorbic acid--has never received its due, Dr. Pauling says, partly because the drug companies cannot make enough money out of it and partly because doctors generally prescribe doses just large enough to prevent scurvy. In a paperback, Vitamin C and the Common Cold (W.H. Freeman & Co.; $1.95), Pauling recommends a daily 250-to-10,000 milligrams to keep colds from being caught, plus a crash dosage of 500-milligram tablets to kill them once they're started. Initial response to his finding was a run on ascorbic acid and much medical skepticism about Pauling's paucity of clinical data.

"I think I'm Onassis' best friend, and he's mine," said Diva Maria Callas, who descended on New York City and told Women's Wear Daily a thing or three. About her best friend's wife: "I'm bored with all the nonsense about how I was furious with Jacqueline Onassis. The fact is, I've never actually met her." About love: "Love is so much patience between two people. But it takes work, and you have to give a lot, and have to receive also like a flower. It is also somewhat of a disease." About Women's Lib: "Women will never be the same as men. They may have better qualities sometimes--but they should not have that banging-through quality."

The new international beauty was both demure and dazzling when she showed up with her mother at a local garden club reception. Wearing high style with young grace, thirteen-year-old Princess Caroline was a credit to her parents --Philadelphia-born Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco.

"Challenge and response" was a catch phrase that Historian Arnold Toynbee used to explain the rise of civilizations. When Granddaughter Clare Toynbee, 21, was challenged by her bank to pay a $240 overdraft, her response was to become a weekend stripper in a Soho nightclub for $72 a session. Confronted by a reporter, she confessed ambiguously, "Oh well, I suppose I couldn't keep it under cover forever," and admitted that the family took a dim view. "At first I felt ashamed to strip completely in front of all those men," added Clare, an Oxford graduate. "But I got used to it."

Jordan's King Hussein may have thought that he had endured his last embarrassment from his first wife, Princess Dina Abdel Hamid, when she doused him with a bowl of soup at a dinner before their divorce in 1957. Not so. The latest shock: Dina's decision to marry an Al-Fatah guerrilla. A week before the wedding, Hussein is reported to have surreptitiously sent the bridegroom, whose code name is "Salah," a present of some $25,000. There were rumors that the gift was intended to buy Salah either out of wedlock or out of the Palestine resistance. It did neither. When Dina and Salah took their vows, it was said that Al-Fatah took the money.

England's Princess Anne, 20, took in the flicks with a new date--Sam Shepherd, 19, ex-furrier's apprentice, son of a docker and star of a low-budget film called Bronco Bullfrog. To protest his movie's removal from a London theater to make room for the premiere of Laurence Olivier's version of Chekhov's The Three Sisters, Sam had dropped Anne a line, asking her to see it with him. While waiting for her at the cinema, Sam fortified himself at the next-door pub with two pints of bitter and a rum-and-Coke. Wasn't he nervous? "She's like any other bird, really," he gulped. When Anne turned up, though, and proffered her hand, Sam kissed it --strictly not done with royalty, and certainly not the customary greeting for birds in the East End.

Secretary of State William Rogers is not averse to a little ribbing of Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger, his rival eminence as foreign policymaker. "The other day I asked Henry what he thought of the Indianapolis 500," Rogers told reporters. Kissinger's answer: "They're all guilty."

EVERYONE is the age he has decided on," says Pablo Picasso, "and I have decided to remain 30 years old."

Pouring huge cups of tea with honey at his villa on the Cote d'Azur, the 30-year-old painter, sculptor and ceramicist--who was born in 1881--winked at his guest of honor, Italian Movie Actress Lucia Bose. Her child, Paola, whose father is Spain's retired superstar of the corrida, Luis Miguel Dominguin, is Picasso's goddaughter, and Lucia's presence, quite obviously, put him in an expansive mood. Why, someone asked, do the peaceful doves for which he is so famous never have any feet? Because, said Picasso, his father, who was an impecunious art professor, used to eke out a living by taking painting commissions on the side. "Doves were his specialty, and when his sight began to fail, he would ask me to finish the pictures where special detail was needed--that was always the doves' feet. I painted so many doves' feet that all my doves, later on, have been footless. After so many feet, I developed an aversion to them."

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