Swedish Director Ingmar Bergman, 47, is almost as pessimistic on paper as he is on film (Winter Light, The Silence). Bedridden for four months with a bronchial infection, Bergman issued a statement accepting The Netherlands' Erasmus Award ($13,800) for his contributions to the arts. It was less a statement than a cheerless obituary on the arts. "Religion and art are kept alive for sentimental reasons," brooded the Lutheran pastor's son; and the modern artistic movement "seems to me like a snake's skin full of ants. The snake is long since dead, eaten, deprived of his poison, but the skin is full of meddlesome life." Styling himself "one of the ants," Bergman concluded grimly: "The artist lives exactly like every other living creature that only exists for its own sake. This makes a rather numerous brotherhood living together egotistically on the hot, dirty earth under a cold and empty sky." Needless to say, Bergman's next movie, Persona, will not be a knee-slapping comedy.

For most politicians, the footing is slippery enough on a dry day at sea level, but Washington's Republican Governor Daniel J. Evans, 39, wanted it higher and slipperier. Square-jawed Sportsman Evans took up crampons, ropes and ice ax, fulfilled what he called a lifelong ambition by making the icy, difficult climb to the summit of the state's highest peak, 14,408-ft. Mount Rainier. Guided by a park ranger and Veteran Mountain Man Dee Molenaar, the Governor made the round trip from a 10,000-ft. overnight camp to the tip in a creditable eleven hours and issued a statement: "I am bushed."

Not far from Betty Grable's legs, John Barrymore's profile, Shirley Temple's seven-year-old scrawl ("Love to the World") and his ex-Wife Ava Gardner's feet, Singer Frank Sinatra, 49, knelt, did the old Hollywood salaam and planted his palms in the wet concrete beside the rococo Grauman's Chinese Theater. Then Frank struck a Jolsonesque pose for Daughters Nancy and Tina and about 3,000 faithful who turned up for the messy rites, some of them dangling from the limbs of trees.

"When I leave this here ball club in the fall, I want to leave a young team behind me." That was New York Mets Manager Charles Dillon Stengel talking, at a New York city hall celebration of Casey Stengel Day, one week in advance of his 75th birthday. What he said sounded something like English. And it sounded something like retirement. Since New Yorkers follow every stumble of Casey's spectacularly miserable Mets, the banners in the afternoon papers bellowed STENGEL TO RETIRE. For a while, the Mets' front office turned into a shambles of confusion and denials. Then Casey explained things. "When I leave" meant "when I go home" to California as usual after the season. "When I get ready to go, I'll say so--in plain English." That incredible prediction pointed up the reason for the whole mixup: Casey had been talking to city hall reporters, who specialize in municipal prose, New York dialect; it is only the sportswriters, after all, who pretend to understand Stengelese.

"Sex?" mused Lord Harlech, 47. "That's a difficult area. What's acceptable varies from generation to generation." As the new president of Britain's Film Censorship Board, the urbane, uncensorious diplomat is himself unimpeachably acceptable--despite a confessed fondness for horror movies. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he succeeded to his father's title last year while, under his more familiar name, Sir David Ormsby Gore, he was Britain's Ambassador to the U.S. "I am prepared," he says dutifully, "to go and see any sort of film."

It was a great vacation and all that, but the young lady, known to her Secret Service protectors by the code name "Velvet," had just about enough of digging in Arizona Indian ruins, floating down rivers on rafts and paddling all day through the wilderness lakes of northern Minnesota. In short, Lynda Bird Johnson, 21, had seen America first, and when she ended the seven-week Western tour, she exclaimed to a Minnesota reporter, "Why, your flies are worse than our Texas flies!" Then she ordered an air-conditioned car to pack her to the nearest outpost of civilization.

Jordan's volatile, hirsute King Hussein, 30, who fences with a scimitar, flies with abandon, and drives with a lead foot, came flashing onto France's Cote d'Azur for a ten-day romp, picked up yet another hair-raising diversion--something called "ascensional parachuting," or "Go Fly a King." It goes like this: the King straps on a special parachute pack, grabs the speedboat towline, skis on his bare feet up to 40 m.p.h., and then POP! Out goes the parachute, up goes the King sailing over the Mediterranean, into which he eventually plunges. He emerges from the flight looking as if the next royal hobby is going to be sumo wrestling.

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