Gathering material in Taipei for his latter-day Around the World in Eighty Days, Humorist's Humorist S.J. Perelman visited a place of refreshment called the Literary Inn. Suddenly he was surrounded by a draggle of highly painted professional ladies who obviously wanted more than his autograph. Only with some difficulty did the world traveler extricate himself from their importunities, but he emerged with wit unblunted. "It was a case," he mused to a friend on the way back to his hotel, "of the tail dogging the wag."

The evening was billed as a "Dialogue on Women's Liberation," and Beat Poet Gregory Corso set the tone by storming out almost as soon as the festivities began. Then, as such literary luminaries as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Philip Roth stared in silence from the audience, Village Voice Columnist Jill Johnston proclaimed that "all women are lesbians" and began an onstage group grope with two female companions. The remainder of the rambunctious encounter featured Novelist and "Prisoner of Sex" Norman Mailer battling a phalanx of feminists led by Australian Author Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch). As the distinctively distaff heckling mounted, Mailer shouted, "I'm not going to sit here and let you harridans harangue me." Mailer's was not the only maimed male ego. When asked by hapless Critic Anatole Broyard to spell out what the liberated woman wants, Greer snapped: "Whatever it is we're asking for, honey, it's not for you."

Some big lights of the movies were hiding under bushels. For Jerry Lewis it was a bushel of clown makeup, which disguised his identity as he brought down the house at Paris' Cirque d'Hiver benefit for old and ailing showfolk. And when Ringmaster Maria Callas announced who the clown really was, the house came down all over again. For Jerry is an important personage in France, an actor whose films are seriously studied. Lewis says he is even thinking of moving to Paris--"a good place to come if you're feeling low." For Bette Davis it was a bushel or two of hippie-esque old clothes for her role as a raffish grandmother whose hobby is robbing banks. The film, currently in production, is called Bunny O'Hare, in which Miss Davis rides a getaway motorbike with Ernest Borgnine. Catherine Deneuve's pretty light looked for a while as though it might go out permanently under bushels of pachyderm. Tiny, flame-haired and frail in black chiffon, she stretched out on the Cirque d'Hiver tanbark and lay there, while a large male elephant stepped carefully over her and carefully lowered himself. Nobody breathed. But the elephant knew when to stop.

Perhaps because it takes one to know one, perhaps because of the company they keep, psychiatrists are traditionally prone to behavioral quirks of their own. In a transcontinental airplane one day recently, a broadcasting executive was just settling down to his postprandial cigar when an attractive lady asked him to put it out. He recognized her as Dr. Joyce Brothers, whose cool, blonde analyses unkink snarled psyches on TV and in the newspapers, and hastened to extinguish the cheroot. But the aroma apparently lingered on and Psychologist Brothers came back. "I'll vomit in your lap if you don't put out that cigar," said Dr. Brothers. "You're asking me to put away my virility symbol," answered the traveler, determined to show that he knew a psychological thing or two. Later, as he was waiting to disembark after the plane had landed, there was Dr. Brothers again. "I hope you're satisfied," she cried, stamping on his foot and heaving a well-filled air-sickness bag at him. It missed.

Future historians may find it convenient to date the end of the Rock Era as the last week of April 1971. It came with neither bang nor whimper --only the booming, Bronxoid voice of Wolfgang Grajonca, better known as Bill Graham, announcing that he had had it. Graham is closing down Manhattan's Fillmore East (this summer) and San Francisco's Fillmore West (next fall)--the two cathedrals of the loud, hard-driving sound that for a memorable decade has been the soul of youth's counterculture. The reason Graham gave was that rock had gained so much of the world that it had lost its soul. "When we started in 1965," he said, "I associated with and employed 'musicians.' Now it's 'officers' and 'stockholders' in large corporations--only they happen to have long hair and play guitars. Rock is becoming a General Motors, a Pacific Gas and Electric." Graham told how the manager of one supergroup said to him recently: " 'Bill, you mean to tell me you expect my act to play for only $50,000 a week?' That did it for me. I had had it."

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