Democratic quasi Candidate Ed Muskie is being flicked by the pointed tongue of ex-Senator Gene McCarthy. Muskie is so ponderous about making up his mind, McCarthy is telling his friends, that if he had been Paul Revere he would have yelled: "The British were here, the British were here!" . . .

Kicking off their first British concert series in 4 1/2 years, the Rolling Stones announced last week that it would be a "Farewell to Britain" tour. The Stones are rolling over to the south of France to live because, said Leader Mick Jogger, "We felt a change of scene, temperature and climate would be good for us." A tax maneuver? "There's nothing to be gained or lost by it," said 27-year-old Jagger, though several British tax experts insist that the move will have definite fiscal advantages for the quintet, which has earned many millions during the past nine years. The Stones are rumored to have already bought a villa near Cannes.

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"Welcome to Pickfair," said the thin, halting voice on the tape recorder. "Thank you for the good things you've said about me in the past." Mary Pickford--superstar of the century's teens and 20s, whose ringlets and little-girl look and marriage to Fellow Superstar Douglas Fairbanks made her "America's Sweetheart"--was greeting reporters at her Beverly Hills mansion. But not in person. Now 77 and operated on two years ago for cataracts, she carefully stayed out of sight while her husband of 33 years, Bandleader Buddy Rogers, 64, announced the re-release of a dozen of her old silent films. Among them: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), Daddy Long Legs (1919), and Pollyanna(920).

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Just as the word casbah brings to mind Charles Boyer's sexily sinister invitation to accompany him there, the name Casablanca evokes the gravelly command of Humphrey Bogart: "Play it again, Sam." So it seemed like a good idea to Pan American Airways to advertise its flight to Casablanca with a movie still of the late Bogey and those immortal words. To his widow Lauren Bacall, though, it seemed like a lousy idea. "Is there no limit to what people will do to make a buck?" she snarled. "It's the worst sort of invasion of privacy. Bogart didn't do this sort of advertising when he was alive, so why should they be able to make him do it when he is dead? How dare they!" The airline pointed out that permission had been obtained from the copyright owners, but it withdrew the ad anyway. Said a Pan Am spokesman: "We don't want to cause anybody any upset."

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It was wrangle time in the literary jungle. First blood was drawn when the National Book Awards' fiction judges refused to list Erich Segal's bestseller Love Story. Poet Allen Ginsberg, one of the five poetry judges, made known his disgust with his fellow panelists' selection of Mona Van Duyn's To See, To Take by burning incense during the award announcements and castigating the choice as "ignominious, insensitive and mediocre." Miss Van Duyn riposted with a metaphor about a rest-room wall covered with dirty words along with a heart enclosing the names of lovers. "I notice the obscenities but write about the heart and the lovers," she said. "Ginsberg notices the heart but writes about the obscenities." In another part of the forest, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. genially kidded the grandstanding proclivities of Norman Mailer. "I think it's vulgar to hog the news to the extent Mailer does," he told a seminar. As to why Mailer does it, Vonnegut said that he has found that "careers last 20 years. It's true of baseball players and chess masters, so you see it has nothing to do with brains. It's some kind of general deterioration of the metabolism. Mailer is smart. He's turned to journalism."

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Dr. Henry Withers, a general practitioner with a large practice in Houston, also serves as VIP-only physician on call for the city's swanky Warwick Hotel. One night recently he got a call from a frantic guest, Martha Mitchell. Her daughter Marty, 10, had a sore throat and fever. When the good doctor turned up, Martha turned up her nose. "He looked like a busboy," she said later. "His hair was frazzled. He had on funny-looking clothes." Withers says he thought he looked "pretty nice. I had showered. I had on a new sports coat, new slacks." When he refused Mrs. Mitchell's request to consult by phone with another doctor, Withers claims, Mrs. Mitchell said: "I'll just call the President." Martha explains: "I'd have called anybody. She's my only little girl." Withers eventually examined Marty and said that he found her sleepy though not seriously ill, but Martha took her to a hospital, where she stayed for four days.

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How did she do it? Elizabeth Taylor's crash program for getting her amplitude into shape for hot pants is said to have included a regimen of grapefruit juice, steak and vitamin B. The new, attenuated Taylor left London last week with Husband Richard Burton for a holiday in Switzerland and the U.S. Burton, who is taking a percentage rather than a salary for his soon to be released film Villain, then plans to begin "hovering," as he puts it, "over the box office return like a Welsh bird of prey."

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