Lyndon Baines Johnson was helping dedicate the School of Public Affairs building named after him at the University of Texas last week, and experienced L.B.J. watchers noticed that something new had been added. For the first time in public, the ex-President was wearing hearing-aid glasses with the plug in his right ear. Up stepped a reporter after the ceremonies. "How long have you been wearing a hearing aid, sir?" he asked. Johnson beamed. "Fine, fine. Glad to see you," he said. . . . The moment they met, everyone could tell that this was the real thing. Actress Joan Crawford and Lassie found each other as winners of Benrus Citation Awards "for outstanding achievements based on time"--the lady as the star with the longest time span in films (45 years), the dog as star of the longest running drama in television (17 years). Gushed Miss Crawford, when she recovered her breath: "I waited 17 years to meet Lassie, and the way he kissed me --he's a real male. Of all my screen kisses, that was the warmest and most affectionate." Lassie could only pant.

Paint, wine, Bering cigars were on his shopping list. He stopped first at the tobacco counter of a drugstore in McLean, Va. No Berings. He took a couple of 95-c- three-packs of Cuesta-Reys instead. Then looked at his watch. It was 12:45 p.m.--no time to get the paint and wine if he was going to make the basketball game at the local Boys' Club. He hurried outside and WHAM--the long arm of the law nabbed him. Shoplifting! Yes, there was the unpaid-for pack of Cuesta-Reys in his pocket. But look here, officer . . . Down at the McLean substation they booked, mugged and fingerprinted former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, then released him to appear in court Jan. 28. "It's just incredible to me that this sort of thing can happen to an American," sputtered Udall. "I want the whole story told in court so that people can see what can happen to an absent-minded individual."

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Latest nurse to tell all is Rita Dallas, 50, who took care of the paralyzed Joseph P. Kennedy for most of the last eight years of his life (1961-69), and serves up a smorgasbord of anecdotage in the current Ladies' Home Journal. Tidbits: The Kennedy boys were not shy about their bodies, as Widow Dallas discovered when Mother Rose Kennedy asked her to deliver towels to Ted and three friends in the sauna. In the White House, John F. Kennedy once summoned her for an interview while he was soaking in the tub. "I was so uncomfortable that I took a washcloth off the rack and threw it to him to cover up. After all, he was the President of the United States!" Because she was "surrounded by the effeminate men who so often inhabit the world of rich women," Jacqueline Kennedy worried for a while about what traits "artistically inclined" John Jr. might develop in the absence of a strong father. "I can't imagine anything worse," said Jackie, "than having your son turn out to be a hairdresser." Long before Chappaquiddick. Ted was getting lost on Cape Cod. Nurse Dallas was along one day when he was taking his ailing father for a drive. "I'm lost again, Dad," said Ted, "you'll have to show me the way home." . . .

"Say, is there any place a mutant can get a decent meal around here?" That quaint query is a line from a "contemporary and American opera" called Escalator Over the Hill. And who is recording it but Viva, underground superstar of such Andy Warhol hand-held flicks as Blue Movie and Bike Boy, and brand-new author of a rather autobiographical and hilariously funny novel called Superstar. Mrs. Michel Auder in relatively real life, Viva combines the best features of a beautiful woman, a four-year-old child and a man from Mars, and is about to try a new role: motherhood. It should, as her novel's heroine might say, be quite a trip.

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That battling hard, Muhammad All, treated the TV audience of the Flip Wilson Show to a poetic version of his March 8 fight with World Heavyweight Champion Joe Frazier: "Now he lands a right./What a beautiful swing!/And the punch throws Frazier/clean out of the ring./Now Frazier disappears from view./The crowd is getting frantic./ But our radars have picked him up./ He's somewheres over the Atlantic./ Who would have thought/when they came to the fight/that they would witness the launching of a black satellite."

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