Everybody has his own definition of getting old. To Brigitte Bardot, now a hardly senescent 38, it will be "the day I can no longer have the man I'd like." The Vogue magazine interviewer seemed a little shocked. What was Brigitte looking for in a man? "That he attract me physically." What about intellect and all that? "It is difficult for me to get interested in subsidiary qualities." Tenderness? "Tenderness is a concentration of all the habits and all the monotonies, to be avoided with care." After describing herself as "the most important sex symbol of all time," Brigitte observed: "Time will destroy me one day, as it destroys everything. But no one else will ever be Bardot. I am the only Bardot, and my species is unique."

"When I began it I had no plan at all. I wasn't even writing a book." That observation by William Faulkner was made in 1933 as part of an introduction to an edition of his first major novel, The Sound and the Fury. The edition never appeared, and Faulkner's 1,200-word preface lay unpublished until the University of South Carolina's James B. Meriwether found the long-missing first page among the novelist's papers and turned the manuscript over to the Southern Review. According to Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury was written in "that ecstasy, that eager and joyous faith and anticipation of surprise." It also contained, he said, the only scene "which would ever move me very much: Caddy climbing the pear tree to look in the window at her grandmother's funeral while Quentin and Jason and Benjy and the Negroes looked up at the muddy seat of her drawers."

Poor little preacher boy. He was forced to memorize sermons by having his head pushed under water, earned a

$3,000,000 fortune that his parents kept from him, was doomed at 28 to a freakish sort of fame. That's the way ex-Evangelist Marjoe Gortner told it in the movie about his life, Marjoe. His father, Vernon Gortner, 69, disagrees. "I heard constantly from him before the movie broke," he said, but when the elder Gortner saw the film, "it was all I could do to choke back tears. Now he's told so many untruths he's afraid to face me. There never was such a sum. If it was money I was after, I'd have been in another business." Why, then, the movie? "Somehow," said Gortner, "he came under the influence of Satan."

In the midst of his office labors John F. Kennedy liked to doodle squares and, arrows and even to make sketches: houses, boats, things like that. Some of his creations he gave away to family and friends (there are five known specimens), but at least one item ended up in the wastebasket. That, apparently, is where someone found a sketch of the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, Mass. Now that picture belongs to an Alexandria, Va., antique dealer named Holly Langhorne, who acquired it in exchange for some objets d'art. Next year, on the tenth anniversary of J.F.K.'s death, Ms. Langhorne says she will reproduce the drawing in an expensive limited edition (all destined for charity). J.F.K.'s original, she says, she "wouldn't part with for a million dollars."

"A little shocked, quite delighted and very happy," was the way Diahann Carroll described her feelings on becoming engaged to longtime (two years) Boy Friend David Frost, the television talk-show star. "He proposed in Los Angeles ten days ago," she added, "and he managed to do it without making it sound like an interview." The beaming Frost refused to kiss his bride-to-be in front of the press, saying, "We'll do that in privacy." He promised the wedding will take place in London at Easter.

He had a million dollars to offer, it was said, to any country that would accept him. As that word was passed, Meyer Lansky, 70, the former Miami gambling king who was ejected from Israel after a two-year stay, took off on a two-day intercontinental odyssey in search of a home. After changing planes in Zurich, he boarded an overnight flight to Rio de Janeiro. But would Brazil let him stay? It did not even let him out of the airport. Neither did Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru or Panama. Inexorably, Lansky's airliner continued its flight to Miami, and there two waiting FBI agents arrested the old man for gambling, tax evasion and various other malefactions. Before leaving Israel, Lansky disclosed that he had bought a burial plot there, adding, "If I can't come back alive, at least my body will."

Many still remember her as a curly-haired moppet singing the Good Ship Lollipop; but Shirley Temple Black, now 44 and the mother of three children, has devoted her recent years to public affairs--as a congressional candidate, U.N. delegate and special assistant on the President's Council on Environmental Quality. Stricken with a breast tumor, Shirley not only underwent a mastectomy but publicly announced the operation so "that women will not be afraid to go to their doctors for diagnosis when they have unusual symptoms." Doctors reported that they had removed all malignancy, and Shirley declared: "I am grateful to God, my family and my doctors for the successful outcome, because I have much more to accomplish before I am through."

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