When a blonde ex-Junior Leaguer named Sally Quinn admitted during a job interview at the Washington Post that she had never actually written anything, the executive editor joked, "Well, nobody's perfect." Nevertheless, Ben Bradlee hired her and carefully molded her into a Post feature writer. Eight weeks ago he had to relinquish her to the greater power base of the CBS Morning News opposite Barbara Walters (TIME, Aug. 20). Sally moved to Manhattan and the apartment of her longtime friend, Warren Hoge, city editor of the New York Post. But soon she moved out again (Hoge had also been seeing Socialite Amanda Burden). Now it seems Bradlee, 52, has decided to look after his Galatea, 32. Parted from Tony, his wife of 17 years and the mother of two of his children, he plans to marry Sally as soon as he gets his divorce.

After months of playing Martha Mitchell's outbursts against John Mitchell's stiff upper lip, followers of the drama are now convinced that the end game has begun. In a phone call to U.P.I.'s Helen Thomas, Martha said that the former Attorney General had left their Manhattan apartment for a destination unknown to her. Winzola McLendon, a friend of Martha's who stayed with her after John's departure, revealed that the couple were communicating only through their lawyers. As for Martha's allegedly disturbed state of mind, the lady spoke for herself. Appearing on NBC in her first television interview in two years, Martha insisted she was all right, declaring "I've never been committed to anything but... the good of my country."

The Dassault Mystere 20 carrying Love Empress Elizabeth Taylor, 41, touched down at Spain's San Sebastian airport in plenty of time for the star to make the local premiere of her movie Night Watch. But there was the problem of the car: it wasn't the regulation Rolls. And then, she had to make a call to Los Angeles. Finally, she had to put on her green and gold sari to prepare herself for the adulation of her fans. But the crowd, whom she had kept waiting for 90 minutes, had other ideas. They booed, hissed and hurled insults at her, and the local paper delivered the coup de grace the next day. "She is old," it declared, "and the complications of her sentimental life have taken their toll."

A soprano cannot always be prima donna assoluta, but Maria Callas, 49, does not stop behaving like one. With only three days to go before her first concert in eight years, Callas bowed out with an eye infection, plunging London Impresario Sandor Gorlinsky and 3,000 fans, some of whom had paid over -L- 100 a ticket on the black market, into purgatorio. Before her vision clouded, however, Callas had seen Gorlinsky schedule her old archrival Soprano Renata Tebaldi, 51, for a London recital just 17 days after her own comeback.

Perhaps deciding not to waste any of her remaining high Cs in what looked suspiciously like aria-to-aria combat, Callas withdrew into doctor-ordered seclusion until rehearsals start for her second scheduled Royal Festival Hall appearance on Nov. 26.

The acoustic problems that echoed through New York's Philharmonic Hall long after it was built in 1962 seem to be solved, but fiscal difficulties persist.

Thus music lovers heard with relief that Avery Fisher, 67, a pioneer manufacturer of hi-fi components, has given an estimated $10 million to maintain what now becomes Avery Fisher Hall, and the fourth Lincoln Center building named for benefactors. Philanthropist Vivian Beaumont Allen gave $5,000,000, Arts Patron Alice Tully, an estimated $5,000,000, and Mitzi Newhouse, wife of Publisher Samuel I. Newhouse, $1,000,000.

Other cultural institutions named for wealthy donors are the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at New York University, the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art in Malibu, Calif., and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Los Angeles Music Center.

But the greatest benefactor of all prefers anonymity: only a bronze plaque at Lincoln Center honors John D. Rockefeller III, whose $20 million seed money turned the idea into reality.

"It's a courageous buy, a great buy," said Manhattan Art Collector Ben Heller. No question about it, the Australian National Gallery's $2,000,000 bid for a 1952 Jackson Pollock abstraction owned by Heller is an audacious, if not inflationary purchase. The painting, Blue Poles, is a typical Pollock skein of blue and black dribbles. Previously, the highest sum paid for an American painting was for another Pollock by the Museum of Modern Art. Its rumored price tag: a mere $350,000.

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