"I think taxes should hurt," said California's Governor Ronald Reagan in 1966. What was hurting the Governor last week was not taxes, but the disclosure that he had not paid any state tax at all for 1970. When reporters first asked him about it, Reagan said that he could not remember his tax form. But the press obviously had been tipped off, and Reagan's office conceded that he had paid no 1970 state tax on his $44,100 salary (now $49,100). "Business reverses" were the reason, said Reagan. Asked about his federal taxes, Reagan said that he had received tax rebates for "the last couple of years." Adding that he had paid $91,128 in state taxes during his five years as Governor, Reagan declared that he hoped to be back on a paying basis soon --"not that I enjoy paying taxes, but because I do not enjoy losing money."

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Consider the sorry lot of Author Erich Segal (Love Story). Airline stewardesses slip him their apartment keys; eager ladies really believe that love means not having to say you're sorry; TV headliners plead for personal appearances. "I'm going into hiding," the beleaguered bachelor told reporters last week. "I want to be alone. I'm so overexposed it's unbelievable. My apartment is a fishbowl." Segal, 33, a classics professor at Yale, plans to take a leave of absence after this semester to devote himself to "scholarly research." Where? "I can't tell you, but wherever I go, it will be alone--I hope."

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Love-and-marriage just ain't the horse-and-carriage it used to be. Sitting beside TV's David Frost at a Manhattan fund-raising dinner last week was his long-run steady, Actress-Singer, Diahann Carroll. "Planning to get married?" someone asked. "No," Diahann batted back, "we don't believe in engagements--we believe in happiness."

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Who do you think has sex appeal? asked London's Sunday Times Magazine, as it began a daisy chain of nominations with Supermodel Jean Shrimpton, 27. She picked Architect Buckminster Fuller, 75 ("I particularly like his geodesic domes"). Fuller picked Ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, 51 ("I have been unable to divest myself of an awareness--not induced by others --that she is of the opposite sex"). And so on, to Rockster Mick Jagger, 27, and his surprise choice: Actor-Author Noel Coward, 71 (no reason given). Coward, too, had a bit of a surprise for his friends. "I should have liked to have chosen Mick Jagger," he said, "but now I've got to know and love Twiggy." Twiggy, 21, didn't pick anyone.

Plastic surgery is practically a branch of show business, but few showfolk talk about their operations on the Johnny Carson Show. British Actress Sarah Miles, however, didn't mind telling 7,200,000 viewers: "I had an ear job." Her ears, she said, "not only stuck out, but they had no shape at all. They used to flap in the wind." Miss Miles' now unflappable ears have given her considerable self-confidence. Asked whom she would choose to be alone with for six months, she said: "Hitler. If I had six months, I might be able to corrupt him into something of goodness."

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The Countess, Vera von Lehndorff, is one of the world's towering beauties --she is the international model built for basketball and known as Veruschka. In Rome she went to the premiere of the film Veruschka, Poetry of a Woman with its writer/director, Franco Rubartelli. The movie, originally a token of their long great-and-good friendship, now seems to have become more of a souvenir. After the show was over, he left with another model and she with another friend.

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The two hardhats digging up the earth next to Washington's National Gallery of Art last week were Chief Justice Warren Burger and Philanthropist Paul Mellon, who is giving the Government a new $45 million annex to the gallery. Burger's ceremonial spadework was the more convincing--perhaps because of his youthful days as a day laborer working on the Robert Street bridge, which spans the Mississippi. That job also helped develop his judicial prudence. The contractor, he recalls, told him to use three bags less cement in the concrete when the inspectors were not looking. "I used the full amount all the time," says Burger, "but I hid the three extra empties to keep from getting caught. Maybe that is what has held the bridge up all these years."

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The public address system at Cranwell, training center for Britain's Royal Air Force, crackled with a special announcement. A defect, the voice said, had been found in the heel design of shoes worn by R.A.F. cadets. All officers were requested to turn in their shoes at the porter's lodge for a check by the makers. Eventually, as the pile of used footgear mounted, suspicions were aroused, questions asked, gossip exchanged. Could the perpetrator of the hoax have been the heir to the British throne, now in training at Cranwell? Said a Buckingham Palace spokesman: "I'm afraid it was." The R.A.F. plans no disciplinary action against Prince Charles.

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