"I feel like Rip Van Winkle, as though I'd been sleeping for four years," said Martha Mitchell, after a photographer discovered the onetime oracle peacefully dining out in Manhattan with her husband, former Attorney General John Mitchell. Now that she is out of the political maelstrom, she uses the telephone to give instructions on the redecoration of her new Fifth Avenue apartment. "It's just madness, like starting in housekeeping again," she said, "Why, I never moved into an empty place before. I'm even out buying hardware, light switches, stuff like that. I don't have time for parties or anything; I'm too tired after working all day Fixing an apartment is like having a baby"

Smile, Allen Funt, this is even more embarrassing than those scenes you used to show on Candid Camera. "It's almost a classic thing," said Funt. "You trust your accountant for years..." He did notice that the object of his confidence lived well: "He had an enormous wardrobe, paid his chauffeur over $200 a week, had a $60,000 bar mitzvah for his son." Then he heard a story about a man who was swindled by his accountant, and "that triggered something in my mind." After some Funt calls to banks, brokers and the police, Accountant Seymour Goldes was indicted on charges of stealing from his star client the grand sum of $1,285,826. Said Funt, unsmiling: "The guy and I couldn't have been closer"

What was it like to be married to Howard Hughes? Well, said Jean Peters, who underwent that experience for 14 years but now wanted to talk to the press about her return to acting in a TV version of Winesburg, Ohio, there was a bit of spare time. She studied psychology at U.C.L.A., she tried "the whole range of arts and crafts," she did door-to-door political polling, and she read textbooks for taping by the Braille Institute until "I couldn't stand the sound of my own voice any more." But what was it really like to be married to Howard Hughes? "That," said Miss Peters, "was and shall remain a matter on which I will have no comment."

Queen Elizabeth, among other things, is patroness of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, so a number of her subjects found it shocking that Princess Anne went out fox hunting three times while visiting the Yorkshire digs of her new beau, Lieut. Mark Phillips of the 1st Queen's Dragoon Guards. Declared the League Against Cruel Sports: "Animal lovers are appalled that the princess appears to be able to do no better with her leisure time than to help beat the daylights out of foxes." From the RSPCA, one militant group demanded that the Queen "express regret" or resign from the organization. A palace spokesman was modestly regretful: "Most of the royal family do not go fox hunting. But this was bound to happen to Princess Anne as she has so many friends who ride and are in that circle. It seems that the temptation was too great."

"He's so good," declared Golf Sage Sam Snead, "he could try not to win and still back into it. "The subject of Snead's admiration: Jack Nicklaus who had just won the Walt Disney World Open golf tournament as though it were child's play--by nine strokes. Nicklaus' $30,000 prize brought his 1972 golfing earnings to an alltime record for the sport: $320,542. (His career total is a record--$1,544,194.) "I hope to be better next year," said Nicklaus.

In the wilds of New Jersey, the limousine encountered a pride of lions, one of which promptly bit it in the tire. After the flat was fixed, the car rolled on, bearing John F. Kennedy Jr., 12, out for an excursion with a friend of the family, Jack Paar. The TV star, who wanted to film a wildlife scene for his forthcoming series, set up his cameras at a preserve called Jungle Habitat and began frolicking with two 80-lb. Siberian tiger cubs. "Hey!" he cried. "This one just bit me!" Cut. Exit Kennedy to his mother, Paar to a medical center for five stitches and a tetanus shot in the wrist.

Among the other business that afflicted The Creation of the World and Other Business, Arthur Miller's first Broadway play in almost five years, was an Eve (Barbara Harris) who had no intention of being anyone's rib. During one confrontation not in Miller's script, Director Harold Clurman told his cast, "I'm going to give you a description, scene by scene, of how it all works." Replied Miss Harris: "If you tell me what I have to do, I won't do it." Said Clurman: "No actor has ever said that to me in 37 years in the theater" In due time, both quit, the play got panned, and Miller said of the three-month effort: "This is the worst I've had."

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