A precedent is always useful in court, so Gina Lollobrigida, 36, was saying: "The theater has always been full of daring performers since Grecian times --even the great Greta Gar bo, who undressed much more than today's actresses without creating a scandal." La Lollo was in a Roman court on charges of "outraging the public morals" by appearing apparently nude behind a bed sheet in Le Bambole (The Dolls). This was silly, said she, loftily. No great actress tries to create a scandal. "Even a spicy part can be done seriously." And besides, she cooed to the judge, it wasn't really she beneath the sheet--merely flesh-colored tights. So the judge reserved judgment, shook her hand warmly, and went off to study the evidence of art imitating reality.

The night they ran A Star Is Born on the late show, Liza Minnelli, 21, found her own rainbow. Poised, but grinning gleefully, she stood before a packed ballroom at Manhattan's Hotel Astor to accept the American Theater Wing's "Tony" award as the season's best musical actress for her Broadway debut in Flora, the Red Menace, a tepid comedy she heats up with a dramatic voice that brings memories of Garland yet is still her own. Her mother Judy couldn't attend; she was at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of the U.C.L.A. Medical Center in Los Angeles, recovering from what friends said was an allergic reaction to a drug. A few nights later, though, she was out, staging still another the-show-must-go-on performance and evoking memories of her own by belting her way through 40 minutes of the old songs at Las Vegas' Thunderbird Hotel. She left the stage to an ovation from the blase Vegas audience.

After six years of painful, reclusive silence, Author J. D. Salinger, 46, has produced another story. It's no Catcher in the Rye or Franny and Zooey--just one more refraction through his magic Glasses in the form of a letter that Seymour Glass, the fictional family's presiding guru and ghost, wrote home from Camp Hapworth, Maine, at the tender age of seven. Published in The New Yorker, the note is introduced briefly by Family Historian Buddy Glass, who for years has been garrulously obsessed by the memory of his suicide brother. By the letter, Childe Seymour seems to have been, practically from birth, a perfervid scholar, linguist, spiritual genius and altogether verbose little man who finds everything in life "heartrending," or "damnable." "My emotions are too damnably raw today, I fear," he starts, and in 28,000 words plunges forth to speculate on God, reincarnation, Proust, Balzac, baseball and the charms of the camp director's wife ("quite perfect legs, ankles, saucy bosoms, very fresh, cute hind quarters"), while insistently querying his parents about "what imaginary-sensual acts gave lively, unmentionable entertainment to your minds."

There are, as every schoolboy knows, practically no "native New Yorkers," but it does get a little embarrassing when you're junior U.S. Senator from New York while being a Massachusetts native living in Virginia and unable even to cast a ballot for yourself. All that is over now for Bobby Kennedy, 39. He has completed his one-year residence requirement and has been duly registered. What's more, he has just bought a handsome $68,000 cooperative apartment overlooking the East River on Manhattan's new United Nations Plaza. The family, of course, will still continue to spend most of its time at the rambling old farm in McLean, Va. After all, how in the world could several shaggy dogs, three riding horses, two Shetland ponies, one burro, nine children, one wife and one U.S. Senator possibly settle down comfortably in a midtown five-room coop?

"I am not a Private Hargrove," twitched Private First Class Christopher '. Hargrove, 20, who has mastered the M-14 rifle, the military salute and the difficult distinction between left foot and right. Three readings of his father's rueful memoirs, See Here, Private Hargrove, taught the young man, now assigned to an information unit at Fort Benning, Ga., not to criticize Army cuisine in front of mess sergeants and otherwise to avoid the disasters that led Marion L. Hargrove, 45, to set himself down 23 years ago as one of the Army's alltime incompetent recruits. The only thing the book didn't teach the boy, incredibly enough, was the basic maxim of military life: young Hargrove volunteered for service. Oh Dad!

Vivien Kellems, 69, marched smartly into the polling booth in Mystic, Conn., sat down on her suitcase, broke out a can of roasted nuts and settled herself for another hard day's civil disobedience. Hoping to repeat her 8 hr.-40 min. polling-booth sit-in of last November, the ding-dong Liberty Belle, former industrialist and Goldwater partisan was protesting Connecticut's mandatory party lever system of voting machines (which makes ticket-splitting more difficult), plus what she called the "high-handed and illegal" selection of constitutional convention delegates by state political chairmen. Alas, she hardly had time to chew a cashew before Elections Monitor James Fusaro invoked the one-minute rule (four minutes late) and had two registrars lift her out. Charged with breach of the peace, Miss Kellems said she would plead not guilty, demand a jury trial.

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