The "best" of a long line of "the best and the brightest"? Henry Kissinger took a bow before his major policy speech on Europe at the annual lunch of the Associated Press in Manhattan. He then explained why the flattering introduction by A.P. Chairman Paul Miller gave him pause. It seems that in the early winter of 1968, President-elect Nixon and Kissinger had paid a visit to L.B.J. The larger-than-life Texan offered a bit of advice on how to ferret out the tattletales of state secrets. "If you want to find out where the leakage is," Johnson said, "listen to newsmen talking. Find out who it is they talk about as being 'bright,' 'intelligent,' 'profound'--and fire him."

The bridegroom's seven children and the bride's six-year-old daughter joined Best Man Frank Sinatra at the most lavish reception ever recalled by the staff of the Beverly Hills Hotel. The assistant chef had spent five days in the freezer molding the names of Newlyweds Dean Martin, 55, and Catherine Mae Hawn, 25, into a massive ice sculpture of hearts and cherubs. Under 15 hanging cages of cooing white doves, 85 guests enjoyed Dean's favorite beluga caviar ($190 a pound) and Dom Perignon ($33 a bottle). The bride and groom stayed only an hour, then returned to the site of the wedding: Dean's Bel Air mansion, decorated to resemble a chapel, complete with dark oak pews borrowed from two movie studios.

Let them eat cheese, suggested Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz when complaints about meat prices reached him. Now he has a new suggestion: eggs. Decked out in a chefs toque emblazoned P.F. (for Plentiful Foods) he confidently launched a Butz omelet before admiring department employees. "Anyone can do this," he announced as he shuffled his skillet like a galloping gourmet. He was so right. The omelet was lumpy and overcooked. Next try was better, and for his efforts the show-off chef was granted membership in the National Good Egg Club.

"Comme elle est beau!" exclaimed Actress Mia Farrow at Paris' Orly Airport, where she had flown to receive her new baby. "Comme elle est belle!" corrected her husband, Conductor Andre Previn. It had taken two years to make the arrangements, but the three-year-old Previn twins now have a three-month-old sister, a war orphan from Saigon. Her name, which Andre says "has just the right Eastern ring about it," is Kym Lark. It means Miss Joyful.

Poor Conduce Mossier Garrison just seems to attract trouble. Nine years ago, her second husband, Multimillionaire Jacques Mossler, 69, was murdered, and she had to suffer through a trial before being acquitted of the crime. Then there was that bad three-story fall taken by her third husband, Electrical Contractor Barnett Garrison, whom the butler found outside their Houston mansion lying in a pool of blood. Garrison is still recovering and was not around for his wife's latest escapade. An intruder who apparently had a key to her Miami Beach hotel room threatened to strangle her, but let her off when she promised not to call the cops. He did, however, make off with $200,000 worth of Candy's "everyday" jewels.

Devil's Island was supposed to be one of the world's tightest prisons. And one of the world's tightest movie sets is the location in Jamaica where Papillon, Henri Charriere's bestselling account of his escape, is being filmed.

Actor Steve McQueen, wearing his maximum-security Brillo-pad beard as Prisoner Charriere, has decreed that there will be no interviews, no visitors. Except, of course, Ali MacGraw, Steve's partner in The Getaway, whom he calls "my old lady."

Chicago's sidewalk critics have their own ideas about art. Picasso's 50-ft. sculpture in the Civic Center Plaza, some say, looks like a baboon. As for the 53-ft. work by Alexander Calder to be placed near by, it appears, from the model, to resemble a butterfly with long feelers or a tulip bending its petals to earth. "Not at all," retorted the 74-year-old artist. "It's more like a flamingo." Even so, Calder has had to redesign part of the 10-ton carbon-steel structure. "This is supposed to be a stabile," he explained, "but with Chicago's wind, we have to be careful it doesn't become a mobile."

She would just as soon toss bricks as words but Bernadette Devlin, 26, the youngest member of Parliament, has not been attracting much attention either way lately. One reason may have been her romance with Michael McAlaskey, 24, the Republican schoolmaster she met last summer while both were campaigning against Britain's entry into the Common Market. After her marriage to Michael in Tullyodonnell, County Tyrone, Bernadette halted in the church graveyard and placed her fiery bridal bouquet of red carnations on the grave of an IRA officer who had been shot by the British army. Then the pair drove off on their honeymoon, leaving with a relative Roisin, Bernadette's 21-month-old daughter, whose father she has never named.

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