Having grown accustomed to her pace--Warsaw, Prague, Belgrade and Moscow in the past four years--Belgians generally regard with affectionate tolerance the Iron Curtain raisings of their beloved Queen Elisabeth, 85, widow of King Albert and grandmother of reigning King Baudouin. But last week, as the indefatigable matriarch boarded a Soviet Tupolev jet for a three-week junket to Peking, Brussels' satirical weekly Pan somewhat impatiently offered her a ghostwritten speech--just in case she might be called upon for a bit of Communist auto-criticism. Pan's suggested script: "Wife of a bloody imperialist, mother of an unscrupulous colonialist, grandmother of a despotic exploiter of the people, I appear before you with the hope that the magnanimity of the Chinese people will authorize me to work at the construction of a dike along the Si-kiang, thus to end well an idle life."

As he awaited the arrival of his seventh child, Bing Crosby, 57, waxed pensive about the snares of parenthood. "With this new set," he said of his children by Second Wife Kathy Grant, 27, "I'm going to try not to repeat the mistakes I made with Gary and Lindsay and the twins." Before the bout of self-criticism was over, the man who has crooned his way to a multimillion-dollar fortune even produced a suggestion for his own epitaph. "If I forget," he enjoined Parade Writer Lloyd Shearer, "you tell Kathy I'd like this line: 'He was an average guy who could carry a tune.' "

"It's time you creative television professionals lit a few million candles to take our children out of the darkness." So saying, the New Frontier's outspoken FCC chairman, Newton Minow, 35, proposed that the nation's TV networks guarantee at least one hour per afternoon of quality programing for children--perhaps through a rotation system that would "divide the competitive disadvantages, if there are any." Within hours after Minow made his plea at a conclave of broadcasting brass, all three major networks made cautiously approving noises, promised to talk the matter over.

Topping the guest list at a $100-a-ticket benefit staged by the American Cancer Society aboard the liner Nieuw Amsterdam, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower found that charity has its own rewards. No sooner had the ship slipped across the three-mile limit outside hurricane-roiled New York harbor than its gambling salon busted wide open. While Mamie, concentrating on the roulette wheel, raked in $75 in funny money exchangeable for donated gifts, the old soldier faded his way into another $60 at the crap table. "I just bet on some fellow holding the dice whom I had never seen before," beamed Ike, "and, by gosh, I came up a winner." Clutching at the Eisenhower coattails was Hungarian Hanger-On Eva Gabor, who burbled, "You're so vunderful, so vunderful." Wondered Ike to Mamie: "Who is she?"

As it must to all model Hollywood couples, the living end came last week for restless Actor-Director Jose Ferrer, 49, and homebody Songstress Rosemary Clooney, 33. After bearing five little Ferrers in eight outwardly placid years of marriage, Rosie called on that grim reaper of cinematic matrimony, Lawyer Jerry Giesler, to file for divorce on grounds of extreme cruelty. "This will come as a surprise to all our friends," wept Rosie, "but it was no sudden decision on my part. Joe and I have had a difference of opinion as to a way of life, and for the children's sake, we feel it is best . . ."

For the benefit of a London newsman bemused by U.S. argot, Novelist Norman (The Naked and the Dead) Mailer, 38, set out to distinguish between hipsters and beatniks. Although the two groups "share a common experience and understand each other's language." pontificated Mailer, "they're utterly different. The hipster is a man of action, always on the move; the beatnik is contemplative, an amateur philosopher. Among world figures today, Kennedy is hip but won't admit it and Khrushchev is hip but doesn't know it." What about British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan? "Irreclaimably square."

Flying into Rio de Janeiro on a lecture tour, Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, 57, irritably denied that he felt any guilt for serving as top scientist on the first A-bomb project. "I carry no weight on my conscience," insisted the white-haired director of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, whose security clearance for participation in U.S. nuclear development was withdrawn in 1954. "Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has now changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of government, not of scientists." But in the Oppenheimer scheme of things, soldiers, unlike scientists, apparently do not enjoy the right to leave political decisions to their governments. Said Oppenheimer: "I would like to see a general strike by the officers of all the armed forces on earth, refusing to drop nuclear bombs or to push the fatal buttons."

Washington's prestigious Metropolitan Club--whose roster includes luminaries from Congress, the Cabinet, Embassy Row and the Pentagon, but nary a Negro--last week lost Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. "It is inconceivable to me, in this day and age," read Bobby's resignation letter, "that the privileges of this club, which holds such a unique and peculiar post in the nation's capital, would be denied to anyone merely because of his race."

Ill lay: ranking Republican Senator Styles Bridges, 63, who, while recuperating from a lung ailment at his Concord, N.H., home, suffered a "moderately severe" heart attack.

Propelled by his special-formula liquid fuel--brandy with a champagne chaser--Irish Author Brendan (The Hostage) Behan blasted clean out of the Celtic atmosphere, confided to Dublin drinking partners that he would like to live in the U.S. "It's a very free place to write in," he explained, "and there's the advantage that no one knows what you're writing about anyway."

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