For 22 years Sir Rudolf Bing has ruled New York's Metropolitan Opera with an iron fist, influencing people but making few friends by imposing rigid discipline on his staff and summarily firing such stars as Baritone Robert Merrill and Maria Callas. Austrian by birth, British and American by achievement, Bing was given the highest accolade of his career last June when the British government made him Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. But in New York, familiarity had bred discontent. All the more surprising when Sir Rudolf--who will retire at the end of this season--walked onstage at the Met opening to make a minor announcement and was greeted by a standing ovation from the audience. "I was quite amazed," Bing admitted. "They applauded me!" Then he went off to kiss Maria Callas. "Despite our differences," purred the diva, "he was a great manager."

Not even defeat by Joe Frazier has halted Muhammad All's interminable chatter. Upon his arrival in Lima, Peru, on his latest Latin American junket, Ali talked nonstop: "Most whites are bad, but I don't hate them. I just don't want to integrate with them." Was there anything he feared more than Frazier's fists? "I don't fear nothing. Oh no, I fear the tax collector more than anything else in the world." Muhammad, the former heavyweight champion, has good reason. Of the almost $30 million he has earned in the ring, he says, nearly $24 million has gone for taxes. After other expenses, all that he had left was $2.5 million--and a large chunk of that went to his first wife.

In Newport News, Va., to christen the nuclear-powered guided-missile frigate U.S.S. California, Pat Nixon was left holding the champagne bottle when the ship began slipping down the ways too soon. "There were supposed to be three whistles," she said. "There were only two, and my goodness, the ship was going down into the water." Recovering quickly, the startled First Lady lunged toward the receding bow, smashed the bottle against it, and was splattered with champagne for her trouble. "She did it right," said the pleased Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. "Some sponsors miss."

The New York Post column by Editor James Wechsler on the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Lafayette Black seemed innocuous enough. Black's departure, wrote Wechsler, "would enable President Nixon to replace him with a man more congenial to the mood of this Administration." Three days after that, a rebuke from Publisher Dorothy Schiff appeared in the Post's "Letters to the Editor" column. "You insist," said Wechsler's boss, "that Mr. Black's so far unnamed successor must be 'a man' (italics mine) of stature, dignity and learning. What an opportunity you have given Mr. Nixon to appoint to our highest court a highly qualified woman, thus proving himself to be less of a male chauvinist than our own Editorial Page Editor!" Said the chastened Editor Wechsler: "I thought her note livened things up."

"I don't think Aunt Susan would have approved of today's Women's Lib leaders," said Susan B. Anthony, 55, in a New York Times interview. "She was a Quaker born and bred, a highly moral virgin, and she lived like an absolute nun. She would have deplored the sexual-freedom aspects of today's movement." Contemporary Susan B. was talking about her grandaunt, Women's Rights Crusader Susan B. Anthony, whose influence she describes in her newly published autobiography The Ghost in My Life (Chosen Books, $5.95). "I spent so many years of my life resenting her and wanting to live up to her," said Susan, who has apparently exorcised her aunt's troubling spirit by writing the book. "Now I'm very proud of her; I think she was a great old gal."

Awaiting Band Leader Duke Ellington when he arrived in Minsk, the second stop on his five-city concert tour of Russia, were a dozen New York cut T-bone steaks. They had been flown in at the request of the U.S. State Department, which had heard that the Duke was wasting away--at the rate of five pounds per day--on Russian cooking. "This is a lie," roared the Duke. "I weighed about 173 when I left the States. But the way my stomach is sticking out now, I know I weigh a lot more." Besides, he added, "I like caviar." Admitting that the urgency of the mission had been "perhaps exaggerated," a State Department official noted that arrangements had nonetheless been made to provide more U.S. steaks for the Duke.

On a tour of Russia to "give our nonviolent movement worldwide exposure," the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy dropped in on Moscow State University and emerged with a greater appreciation for the state of higher learning in the U.S. "I didn't see the ray of jubilance and youth and sunshine that is often seen on the American campus," said the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "The students were much older than in American universities, there was very little participation and dialogue. Presumably what the professor had to say was the last word."

"He can put you off--living up to your father's reputation," says Paloma Picasso, 22, the daughter of Artist Pablo Picasso and Franchise Gilot.

That is why Paloma stopped drawing when she was 13--"because everyone was always asking me about it. I was frightened." But good genes cannot be repressed for long. Paloma, whose imaginatively bizarre taste in clothes and makeup recalls some of her father's more abstract creations, has since designed jewelry both for Saint-Laurent and for a collection now being sold under her own name, and will shortly arrive in Manhattan to fashion fur coats for Jacques Kaplan. "When you're young, that's the time to experiment," says Paloma. "Later you can settle down to the thing that suits you best."

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