The plangent Southern accent coming through the telephone receiver was familiar. The political philosophy was downright unmistakable. "The Supreme Court should be abolished," Martha Mitchell told the Washington Evening Star last week after the court had rejected the arguments of Husband John Mitchell's Justice Department against desegregation by busing (see THE NATION). "We should extinguish the Supreme Court," she decreed. "We have no youth on the court, no Southerners, no women--just nine old men. I have never been so furious. Nine old men should not overturn the tradition of America."

Author Erich Segal may have been a longtime No. 1 on the bestseller lists with Love Story, but you can't win them all. He panted in 489th out of a field of 887 in last week's Boston Marathon. But, as Harper & Row's pro motion manager must certainly agree, it wasn't a total loss--the 26 miles, 385 yards seemed to be lined with Love Story lovers. Said No. 489 afterward: "The muscles that hurt the most are in the mouth, from smiling back at the people." For Segal the marathon also disproved those who claimed success had made him soft. "They say Segal is off sipping champagne from girls' slippers." he boasted. "You can tell them I sip Gatorade from girls' track shoes."

"I want him to quit, really," said Florence Frazier, wife of the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. "It takes so much out of your life." But Husband Joe Frazier, emerging from a visit with President Nixon, shrugged: "All wives are like that--quit being a fighter, quit being a President."

Inside the Third Reich, the memoirs of Hitler's protege and confidant Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments and War Production, is being translated into Hebrew. Profits from the book's sale in Israel, Speer hastened to announce last week, will be donated to a youth-oriented German organization called Action Sign of Atonement.

"At 15 I visualized myself as a world-famous author of 70 with a mane of wavy white hair. Today I am practically bald." This balding, world-famous author. Vladimir Nabokov, celebrated his 72nd birthday in Switzerland last week by working on a new novel that may be called Transparent Things. The new work, he explained to the New York Times, is being composed on his usual "scrambled index cards, which I gradually fill in and sort out, using up in the process more pencil sharpeners than pencils." Nabokov described his success at beating the biblical quota of 70 years as "a feat of lucky endurance, of paradoxically detached will power, of good work and good wine, of healthy concentration on a rare bug or a rhythmic phrase. Another thing that might have been of some help is the fact that I am subject to the embarrassing qualms of superstition: a number, a dream, a coincidence can affect me obsessively--though not in the sense of absurd fears but as fabulous, and on the whole rather bracing scientific enigmas incapable of being stated, let alone solved."

"Punctuality," said Louis XVIII, "is the politeness of kings." Kennedys are not kings--as no one in Bonn last week needed reminding. On tour with the Boston Pops Orchestra, Teddy Kennedy and his wife Joan (who narrates Peter and the Wolf), seemed to be late everywhere they went. Joan kept Mayor Peter Kramer and the fire department band cooling their heels for 45 minutes at the City Hall. Joan was at least an hour late for U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Rush's cocktail party. Joan was two hours late for the party given by West German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel: Teddy was only 20 minutes late for his appointment with Chancellery Minister Horst Ehmke. At a reception given by the Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia, Teddy was 90 minutes late and Joan didn't show at all. And on the night of the concert, Teddy turned up 45 minutes late at the table where Foreign Minister Scheel and Ambassador Rush were waiting for him. The German press took note. The Silddeutsche Zeitung referred to the Kennedys' "lack of feeling for time and protocol." Wrote influential Columnist Walter Henkels in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "A subtle wall of estrangement and aloofness seemed to have arisen between Senator Edward Kennedy and his wife Joan on the one hand, and the Bonn people on the other."

Marriage? Certainly not, said little Mick Jogger of the Rolling Stones, while Bianca just stood there in her see-through and smiled. Yes, St. Laurent's St. Tropez boutique was making a dress for Bianca, and yes, they were both staying up in the Hotel Byblos there, and yes, "Bianca and I have been together for several weeks. But I have no plans to marry." Still, 21-year-old Bianca Perez Morena de Macias of Nicaragua went on smiling, and Mick added cryptically: "I'm not the sort of bloke who would make a big fuss of announcing a date, am I?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.