It takes one to know one. Speaking at Briarcliff College in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., Journalist Tom Wolfe, 42, chided lawyers on both sides of the Watergate witness table for being impenetrable prose artists. For example, "Samuel Dash, a professor of law, I believe, says, 'Was this his own volitional action?' When translated, he really means 'Did he want to do it?' " As for New Journalism itself, Wolfe wasn't abandoning the Kandy-Kolored circumlocutions that had made him famous, but he claimed he was never going to talk about them again. Or as euphuistic Wolfe put it: "I'm taking Trappist vows of silence. It will involve a media fast which will be permanent on the subject of the New Journalism. This is my final and ultimate statement on the subject."

For Austrian Ethologist Konrad Lorenz, a couple of shadows marred the sunny days following his capture of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (TIME, Oct. 22). First a bunch of trigger-happy hunters shot 19 of his animal subjects: graylag geese living on his Gruenau observation grounds. Then came the discovery that the $4,000 Schiller prize, which Lorenz won just after the Nobel, had come from a German neo-Nazi group, who presumably had misunderstood his analysis of violence in On Aggression. Turning the prize money over to Amnesty International, an organization that keeps tab on the number of political prisoners round the world, Lorenz was visibly angry. "My work has always been apolitical," he declared. "But I am anticapitalist. The only politician I've admired is Alexander Dubcek."

When Farah Diba, an Iranian Girl Scout, and basketball captain of her Teheran school, married the Shah of Iran in 1959, Iranian women were traditionally considered to have "more hair than brains." However, by 1963 Farah's influence on the Peacock Throne was obviously being felt: the Shah gave women the vote. Winding up a private visit to Paris, Empress Farah, 35, stopped off to see the latest portrait of herself, a larger-than-life work by French Painter Edouard Mac'Avoy. The background shows Iran happily progressing toward the millennium: ancient columns mingling with oil derricks, children learning to read, Oriental rugs, exotic birds and cheerful workers. Farah diplomatically praised the portrait, "not because of the resemblance, but because I have an air both aware and serene ... and also because of the poetic background, modern and social, just as I had hoped."

John Ono Lennon, 33, and his wife Yoko Ono, 40, are busy at their respective careers on different sides of the continent. In Hollywood, John is grooving an album to be released this week, called Mind Games, which includes such Lennon novelties as the three-second Nutopian International Album; Bring on the Lucie; and Aisumasen (I'm Sorry). Back in Manhattan, Yoko opened a gig in an Upper East Side pub, delivering a program of her own non-songs, which she delivered off-key. As a feminist, didn't she feel exploited appearing in shiny black knee boots and hot pants? Replied Yoko: "Feminism can be too militant and, anyway, jeans can be sexier than hot pants."

The young lieutenant colonel was not allowed by the bourgeois Polo family to visit their teen-age daughter Carmen. Displaying the determination that would later win him all of Spain, Francisco Franco captured the girl's heart by tucking messages into the hatband of a mutual friend who then delivered the love letters to the bride-to-be. Last week Francisco, 80, and Carmen, 71, celebrated their golden wedding, anniversary with a formal Mass at the Pardo Palace, attended by the Council of the Realm, most of the royal family and leading government figures. "A very quiet family day," El Caudillo called it as he accepted congratulations for five decades of "happy, virtuous, simple living."

Poor Butterfly. No less than Japan's Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka is accused by his own daughter Makiko, 29, of knocking her about. Remembering life with Father as a very happy one, Makiko nonetheless goes on to count her bruises in the weekly magazine, Yomiuri. When she wanted to go to a U.S. high school, her father belted her. The same thing happened when she wanted to become an actress. Because Makiko "talks too much," Premier Tanaka even advised her husband, musclebound Naonori Tanaka: "Beat her up once in a while to retain your prestige as a man." While she was only confirming what former Premier Eisaku Sato's wife has already revealed about Nipponese sexual politics, Makiko did hand reporters an irresistible opening line for the pugnacious Premier's next press conference: "And when, Mr. Prime Minister, did you stop beating your wife?"

The Mom of Women's Liberation, Betty Friedan, flew to Rome last week on the eve of the first meeting of the Vatican's special study commission on the role of women in society. Friedan spent four minutes in a private audience with Pope Paul VI, urging him to accord women "personhood." The Pope thanked her for the work she had done on behalf of women and accepted as a gift a brass Women's Lib symbol. Said Friedan to the Pope: "As you see, this makes a different kind of cross." Friedan avoided dogmatic issues like birth control and divorce, maintaining that "the meeting was the message." But she did have one real ideological problem: whether she should cover her head. Rejecting what she described as a symbol of women's inferiority in Judeo-Christian culture, Betty compromised on a non-hat hat--a headband.

"That talented Austerlitz girl's little brother" was the way Fred Astaire, ne Austerlitz, started out in vaudeville. But Fred, 74, has long since soft-shoed his big sister Adele, 75, into the shadows. Now Fred's career as he tapped his way from Omaha to Hollywood has been choreographed in Starring Fred Astaire (Dodd, Mead & Co.). Making his theatrical debut as Roxane, Fred, 6, was the foil for Sister Adele's Cyrano de Bergerac in a junior production at their first dancing school in Manhattan. The tyro terpsichores are also glimpsed performing a bride-and-groom routine atop a prop wedding cake, with an incipiently suave Fred already puttin' on his white tie, brushin' off his top hat, dancin' in his tails.

"I'm Linda Lovelace," says the longhaired actress hoarsely, "and I know what you want." However, before Los Angeles television viewers can jump to any conclusions, the porno-chic Deep Throat artist waves a man's oxford at them, and continues her spiel: "You're looking for comfort, variety and style. So I guess we have a lot in common. Like in shoes." It is the M. & J. Shoe Co. that has Linda Love-lacing up their product over the Southern California air waves, apparently reasoning that exploitation fits their purpose like--er--an old shoe.

On what may seem to some to be a dangerously suggestive circulation-promotion gimmick, Forbes magazine President Malcolm Forbes, 54, has taken to the skies in a hot-air balloon. Determined to become the first person to cross the U.S. in a hot-air craft, Forbes took off from Coos Bay, Ore., on Oct. 4. Last week he set down on a farm near Esbon, Kans., the geographical center of the country, which he figures to be about 20 ballooning days from the New Jersey coast. Aeronaut Forbes is not drifting East on a wing and a prayer, however. His entourage includes 16 people, a helicopter, a Corvair and a mobile home.

Westminster Abbey had never vibrated to such a rhythm: 2,000 fans clapping as Edward Kennedy ("Duke") Ellington, 74, danced and hand-clapped his way down the nave after giving a concert of a dozen new compositions of his own in honor of United Nations Day. Princess Margaret and Prime Minister Edward Heath were among the Ellington loyalists who heard the choir of the Royal College of Music and Swedish Soprano Alice Bobs sing lyrics never to be found in the Anglican hymnal. "Is God a three-letter word for love," they caroled, "or is love a four-letter word for God?"

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