His amours with Actresses Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve and Jane Fonda are behind him now, and French Film Director Roger Vadim has been pursuing other muses. "To be a director is to be a painter in a way," he says by way of explaining his new interest. "You train your sense of aesthetics, of color, objects, volume and light. Most of the time when I was making my last movie, I was acting like a painter." Vadim, 47, who now shares his Paris menage with Lover Catherine Schneider and their one-year-old son, works primarily at night, putting his amateur erotica onto canvas. With his new movie, La Jeune Fille Assassinee, scheduled for release in the U.S. in June, and his autobiography ready for publication in France, Vadim hopes to have time to start working by sunlight. "I like to paint, but at the moment I am not satisfied with what I do," he confesses. "I would love to have enough money to only paint for a few years."

"They had stunt men standing by," explained former light heavyweight Boxing Champ Archie Moore, "but if the star was going to fight personally, then I was going to do the same." Moore, 61, probably regretted his decision during four hours atop a moving railroad car with stone-faced Actor Charles Branson. The fight scene, shot in a snowstorm in the Idaho Rockies, was filmed for Breakheart Pass, a western based on a novel by Adventure Author Alistair Maclean. At one point in the action, both men hung by their hands from the train roof and struggled to pull themselves back on board. "I pulled myself up with both arms, but I saw Bronson do a one-arm pull that astonished me," said Moore afterward. "He was amazing."

The toothy smile is the same, but Singer Carly Simon definitely shows some new angles on her latest album cover. Simon, whose folksy laments and ginghamy good looks were a staple of the early '70s, has switched to a skimpy chemise and earthier songs on her new record playing possum. "It's a body album," she says. "More than previously, when my songs were more intellectual, it seemed right to display my body on the cover. The record says basic things, mostly about sex and things related to sex." Her new look, adds Simon, came about purely by accident during a picture session. "I never would have wanted that for an album cover," she says of the chemise. "But I did wear it underneath my dress, along with black boots. I was feeling kind of soulful and did a striptease. Photographer Norman Seeff liked the effect."

He is lovable old grandpa on The Waltons' TV series, but Actor Will Geer, 73, is still the leading man in some circles. Last week Geer, along with ex-Wife Herta Ware and Protege Michael Wilson, trouped through Chicago retirement hotels with a program of poetry and song. "We do little pieces of authors that these old girls might remember," said Geer of his readings from Robert Frost and Walt Whitman. The white-haired women in his audiences seemed appreciative, but they were still a surprise to the actor. "People talk out loud just as they do when they're watching television in the parlor," said Geer. "Last night a lady grabbed me by the waist and repeated, I must speak to you personally. I must speak to you personally.' I didn't know what she wanted. I thought maybe she was one of my former wives."

Dancer Leslie Caron is really rolling these days. Despite the 24 years since her film debut in An American in Paris, Caron looked fit enough as she rehearsed on roller skates for the 42nd Gala de l'Union des Artistes, a Paris benefit in behalf of retired entertainers. The show, which takes place May 23, features show-biz folk in a circus setting and includes Actresses Romy Schneider as a horsewoman and Sydne Rome as a lion tamer. Caron, 43, who first laced on skates just three weeks ago, has been wheeling about every day and, according to bystanders, is improving fast. The former ballerina still seems a trifle apprehensive about the whole thing. Says she: "My God, dancing is one thing, but this roller skating is really something else."

"I would have been an architect," reflected Lord Snowdon, 45, when asked about alternatives to his photography career. "I did architecture at Cambridge, but failed my exams." Architecture's loss was B. Altman's gain. The Manhattan department store last week opened an exhibit of photographs by the royal family's famous inlaw. While Snowdon shuttled between interviews and autograph sessions, store officials hawked his book Assignments at $12.50 per copy. "They're just photographs that reflect or record moments in life," said Snowdon. "If there is a recognizable style, then that's my failing." How had fame from his professional success and marriage to Princess Margaret affected his work? "If your face becomes familiar, it makes it harder to work in an anonymous kind of way," he answered. "I've got a totally anonymous face that happens to have been photographed."

"It is the desire of Miss Christina Onassis, and she understands it to be also the desire of Mrs. Jacqueline Onassis, that they both be left at peace and all detrimental and harmful speculations cease." With that statement aimed at curbing all rumors, Christina Onassis joined with Stepmother Jackie on the island of Skorpios for the Greek Orthodox service marking the 40th day after her father's death. While a village priest swung an incense-filled censer, Jackie, Christina and a score of Aristotle Onassis' closest relatives and friends offered prayers in Ari's behalf. Afterward, worshipers completed the ceremonial rite of passage by eating from a specially decorated 44-lb. loaf of bread--a symbolic act to send the soul of the late shipping magnate heavenward.

After bouncing back from polio as a youth, a severe horseback riding accident at 50, and the installation of a pacemaker seven years ago, Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, 76, has reason to distrust the dire warnings of his physicians. And that, suggested some of his acquaintances last week, might account for his overhasty return to work after suffering a stroke in December. Last week, after one month back on the bench, the tough old jurist temporarily postponed his comeback and, with Wife Cathy at his side, checked into Manhattan's Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. Not to be outmaneuvered by his more conservative colleagues, however, the liberal Justice had first listened to oral arguments in the Fowler v. North Carolina death-penalty case, the most important decision facing the court this term.

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