The four gracious Georgian mansions on Manhattan's Park Avenue between 68th and 69th streets were occupied by governments and such, but that was all right with the little old lady who lived around the corner on 68th Street. She didn't even mind in 1960 when Nikita Khrushchev visited the corner house, which was the Soviet U.N. mission, and played a noisy balcony scene. But when workmen started to raze the former mission and its neighbor in favor of a banal apartment tower, she minded very much and, identified by the sellers only as a "person of immense good will" she pledged $2,000,000 to buy the buildings for the city. Who was she? Well, she doesn't care for publicity, but she was the Marquesa de Cuevas, 67, widow of the ballet impresario and a granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, who left her $25 million when he died in 1937.

Wisconsin's freshman Democratic Representative John A. Race, 50, made it picture-window clear that he has no conflict-of-interest problems. His statement of assets: 1961 Chevrolet, $1,000; home in Fond du Lac, $7,200 (minus a $6,000 mortgage); cash, $500. In fact, since he quit his $125-a-week machinist's job to campaign in July, he, his wife and daughter "have been eating bean soup and peanut-butter sandwiches"; and he borrowed $1,750 from his campaign fund, and $1,500 from the bank to tide him over until he could start collecting his $30,000 annual congressional salary this month.

She was five, he four when they were married in Westminster Abbey. But the year was 1478, when life was nasty, brutish and short. Within a decade, the groom, Richard, Duke of York, was murdered in the Tower of London, along with his brother, King Edward V--according to legend by order of their uncle, who afterwards reigned as Richard III. Many historians believe that it was not Richard "Crouchback," but England's next ruler, Henry VII, who murdered the princes; yet no one knew what had become of York's bride, Anne Mowbray. Last week the London Museum announced that her tiny coffin had been discovered on the site of a medieval nunnery near Westminster, where she died, apparently of natural causes, in 1481 at the age of eight.

Papa Cesar founded the Paris hotel whose name became a synonym for class. Mama Mimi, after her husband's death, boarded Nazis during the Occupation, keeping the Allies posted on their travels. Last week Charles Ritz, 72, now Chairman of Paris' Ritz, flew to Manhattan to check into the strategies of Europe's latter-day invaders. He sampled a $90-a-day suite at the New York Hilton, ran his finger over the moldings, ordered snacks in from room service (usually in the wee hours), and emerged from his experiment reassured. "The Hilton is good in its field," he said kindly, "but the clientele just does not demand the same thing."

"I've had leave of absence from my marriage for too long," said Actress Rachel Roberts, 35, Rex Harrison's fourth wife. She is quitting the title role of the London hit Maggie May, "the best part I've ever played," because she doesn't see much of her 56-year-old husband. He has been steadily on the commute between Italy (for filming The Agony and the Ecstasy) and the U.S. (for My Fair Lady's many openings). Now the Welsh actress will travel with her Professor Higgins, and they plan to adopt a baby.

Controversy swirls about him as does the Ogooue River about his jungle hospital at Lambarene. Yet dissonance is nothing new to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, theologian, musician and healer, who first became the eye of the whirlpool with his 1906 tract on Christ as a historical figure. On his 90th birthday, Schweitzer left his tin-roofed clinic, founded in 1913 and often criticized today as patronizingly primitive, to cross the Ogooue for a Bach broadcast beamed in by Radio Gabon from his native Alsace-Lorraine. He returned to receive gifts, among them a 17th century Coptic cross from a Manhattan admirer and two eggs from an aged tribeswoman.

Ten years ago, Davis Cup Captain Bill Talbert told Chuck McKinley, a Missouri pipe fitter's son, to "read something besides the sports pages, because some day you'll have to stop playing tennis and make a living." McKinley put off the day by helping the U.S. repatriate the Davis Cup and winning at Wimbledon in 1963. But the Aussies have the cup back now, and Chuck, at the ripe age of 24, is figuring it's "time to get started" on that something else. So he passed up a three-year pro contract for $75,000, and signed on as a stockbroker with Wall Street's R. W. Pressprich & Co. He can keep in trim on the lunch hour, since not only Talbert but old Wimbledonians Vic Seixas and Dick Savitt work down the street.

Carny barkers call it the shell game, but on Fifth Avenue it's played with diamonds instead of peas. One woman inspected a tray of rings in Tiffany's, then sauntered across the avenue to Jeweler Harry Winston, 68, where she did it again. In her wake, Tiffany's discovered that a 3.69-carat rock, worth $19,800, had been replaced by a similar but inferior 2.75-carat stone, worth only $7,500. And where was the Tiffany ring? Why, over at Winston's, nestling in the slot formerly occupied by a 5.30-carat number worth $38,500. Winston was glum (though insured), and Tiffany's boss, Walter Moving, 67, kept both his own ring and the smaller one, which had no label. "This is a robbery we made a profit on," he boasted. But the little lady, folks, did even better.

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