"I rage. I melt. I burn." In these smoldering terms, Germaine Greer, the muliebral but mildly misogamist priestess of Women's Lib, announced in London's Sunday Times that she had fallen in love with an unidentified male. Elaborating on her feelings, she continued: "I also simper and maunder. I am no better than an imbecile. I have collapsed into gaping idiocy. Give me excess of it, that the appetite may sicken and so die. I am treacherous to my own sex." -

In Rome, 2,000 happy hairdressers gathered for an audience with Pope Paul VI heard kind words for their profession and their patron saint, the 17th century Peruvian mulatto St. Martin de Porres, who had once been apprenticed to a barber. St. Martin, said the Pope, was "an example to imitate, an encouragement to bring to your profession willingness and helpfulness." Hairdressing, concluded the Pope, offers "abundant opportunities to help many people recognize the goodness of God."

Looking the very model of modern motherhood, Actress Catherine Deneuve, 28, posed with her new daughter Chiara, whose father is Actor Marcello Mastroianni and whose older brother is Christian, whose father is Movie Director Roger Vadim. Miss Deneuve never married either Vadim or Mastroianni, but she once was wed (from 1965 to 1970) to British Photographer David Bailey, so she invited Bailey to take the first photographs.

When Richard Burton arrived at Wimbledon, he was escorting a young brunette, and Elizabeth Taylor was nowhere in sight. "This," Burton beamed to curious reporters, "is my daughter Kate. I wanted her to see Wimbledon. Elizabeth, unfortunately, is working." Kate, whose mother is the actor's first wife, Sybil, had her own opinion of the Wimbledon tennis tournament. "It's smashing," she said. -

Consumer Crusader Ralph Nader arrived in Australia and told an airport press conference that he was here to check on, among other things, "the threatened extinction of kangaroos." This puzzled some Australians, since they kill a surplus of some 2,000,000 large kangaroos a year, and officials say none of these species is in any danger. Actually, Nader's basic project was a more familiar one: he was giving a series of lectures to raise money for the consumer cause, and in his talks he criticized Australian auto safety as five years behind U.S. standards. To this, Prime Minister William McMahon responded with a harrumph: "He's a paid pot stirrer."

At 3 1/2, Carlo Ponti Jr. (alias Cip`i) already speaks a combination of Italian, English and German, but he doesn't have too many friends. So his mother Sophia Loren hired a pair of swimming instructors and invited the gardener's children, the chauffeur's children and various neighbors for some lessons in the pool at the Ponti villa outside Rome. Cip`i didn't much like the water --it got in his eyes and ears --and at one point he called out to his mother, "Ich liebe dich, but can I come raus?" The result of a week's garden parties: Cip`i not only has new friends but he can also float. -

Who owns the echoing words of Charles de Gaulle? For years Reporter Andre Passeron of Paris' Le Monde trailed the general, copying down speeches, comments, even jokes. Published in two fat volumes, the results pleased De Gaulle so much that he mastered his dislike for journalists long enough to receive Passeron for 45 minutes. After De Gaulle's death in 1970, Passeron issued another volume containing 85 pages of quotations, including some that had become politically embarrassing. The book irked De Gaulle's son Philippe and daughter Elisabeth so much that they brought suit, insisting that his utterances, however public, were private property. A French court agreed that Passeron had quoted too much and written too little himself. It confiscated the book and fined Passeron and his publisher $10,000. -

Oh, say, Francis Scott Key could not possibly have seen the American flag waving over Fort McHenry on that day in 1814 when he wrote The Star-Spangled Banner. According to Librarian P. William Filby of the Maryland Historical Society, it was raining and it would have taken a gale to move the heavy banner. "What Key probably saw was a flag wrapped soggily around a pole." Concludes Filby: "Key didn't come running ashore crying 'Chaps, I've just produced the national anthem.' " He fitted his new poem to the tune of an English drinking song because he had used the same tune nine years earlier, a piece that expressed a now familiar vision: "By the light of the star-spangled flag of our nation."

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