"I'm the women's champion of the world now," crowed Robert L. Riggs, 55, about his $12,500 win over Margaret Smith Court, 30. Serving taunting sidearm twisters, sky-high lobs and--surprise!--zinging aces, Riggs took just 57 minutes to defeat Mrs. Court, the current queen of women's tennis, 6-2, 6-1.

Immediately after that match, the runty tennis hustler talked about a women's match "to see who gets to play me next.

Let the girls fight it out." Riggs has turned down matches with both Billie Jean King and Chris Evert--with purses of $10,000 and $50,000. "There won't be any match until the price is right and that means $100,000 plus." Meanwhile, Riggs applied to play in a women's tournament in Newport, R.I., this summer. He said he would claim discrimination "if they do not accept me.

I'll even wear a dress." Sure, came back the word. If Riggs wore that dress.

Scene: Hyannis Port, early spring, 1968, a few months before Bobby Kennedy's assassination. Bobby was leading in the presidential polls. Jacqueline Kennedy was "more excited than I had seen her for years," Joseph Kennedy's nurse, Rita Dallas, writes in her new book The Kennedy Case. "Won't it be wonderful when we get back in the White House?"

Jackie called out to a roomful of the clan. "What do you mean, we?" Ethel answered, cutting her cold. Nurse Dallas recalls that the next day Jackie asked her about her own lonely years as a widow and spent the day walking to "all the familiar places that were dear to her and the President." Later Jackie laid her cheek on Joseph Kennedy's hand and whispered, "You'll always know I love you, won't you, Grandpa?" Not long after, Jackie married Ari.

Twenty years ago, when the British made the extraordinary first conquest of Mount Everest, it seemed like one of the last great adventures left to man.

But now some of the derring-do has gone out of the climb. A few weeks ago an Italian expedition of 64 climbers brought in 60 tons of equipment, including two helicopters, to put eight men at the top. "A very competent military operation which had nothing to do with mountaineering," huffed Sir Edmund Hillary, who with Tenzing Norgay had raised the British flag on the summit. Hillary, who devotes himself to building schools for Nepali Sherpa children in the Everest region, said he hoped the crest would be left to small parties of climbers. "It's now reached the height of the ridiculous."

The handsome face with the jaunty beard and mustache was vaguely and sadly familiar. A cache of newly discovered photographs, handed down by a friend of one of the Czarina's ladies in waiting, includes one of Czar Nicholas II, canoeing with his son, Czarevich Alexis, and another of the Czar's two youngest daughters, the Grand Duchesses Maria and Anastasia. The specter of their Romanov majesties was also unexpectedly raised in London by Liberal Party Leader Jeremy Thorpe.

Although history has it that the whole family was wiped out by the Bolsheviks at Ekaterinburg in 1918, an amateur historian has convinced Thorpe that some members escaped alive.

Thorpe has begun a formal inquiry into communications that he says have been going on since last May between the British Foreign Office and Washington regarding the rescue of the former Czar and members of his family.

Right there in the girlie magazine's gamy letters-to-the-editor column, who should turn up but Ronald Reagan? Unlike the other correspondents, who like to share their sexcapades, he was writing Penthouse to compliment Cartoonist Al Capp on a highly flattering article mentioning the Governor of California that had appeared five months before.

"Naturally, I find [Capp] most perceptive. Seriously, I was greatly impressed by his entire article." Was Reagan a regular reader of Penthouse? No, said his secretary; someone had sent him the Al Capp clipping. Perhaps he had a personal subscription she was unaware of.

"Oh," she said, "I doubt it very much."

Poet Allen Ginsberg, in California for some college lectures, also did a little singing, accompanying himself on his harmonium. He and his father, Louis Ginsberg, 77, have started putting blues-style melodies to the verses the older Ginsberg, a retired teacher, still composes. Louis' poems are not at all like Allen's. They rhyme: "It was not coffee/ I was drinking up/ But something wine-like from your spirits cup."

"I don't want to divert from the Watergate issue--that would be the cowardly thing to do," declared the familiar earnest voice from beneath familiar furrowed brows. "Pat and I this day have adopted two Vietnamese orphans --one from North Viet Nam, one from South Viet Nam. In America, anything is possible." The sound is Richard Nixon, emanating from Impressionist David Frye, taking off the President to crowds at Washington's Shoreham Hotel, Nixon's election-night headquarters. Frye, hunching into his shoulders and flashing a V sign, continues: "My Administration has taken crime off the streets and put it into the White House, where I can watch it. Regarding Watergate, those men were wrong. Well, nobody is perfect. They made a mistake--they got caught."

Astronaut Geologist Dr. Harrison Schmitt seems to have learned something about memory as well as about the moon when he took his lunar stroll last year: "My moon walk was so brief that few impressions were implanted in my mind. Every now and again I start to tell somebody about something I saw on the moon, and I realize I'm telling about something I saw in a picture."

On his first day as acting president of San Francisco State College, 4 1/2 years ago, S.I. Hayakawa, wearing a plaid tam-o'-shanter, jumped on top of a student striker's sound truck and ripped out the loudspeaker wires. Although he cooled the campus, he managed to stir up some controversy of his own. Student activists have been trying unsuccessfully to stick him and the trustees with a federal suit alleging embezzlement, bribery, fraud, racial discrimination, lack of due process and misappropriation of student funds.

Now retiring as president, Hayakawa, 66, was presented by dissident students with a T shirt emblazoned with a swastika. "To some of you, I am a racist pig," responded Hayakawa. "To others, I am the savior of the university." But he had had enough of both roles. "I would hate like hell to do this again," said the semanticist in simple English.

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